“Sochi” did not detain the veteran – Newspaper Kommersant No. 62 (7507) dated 04/11/2023

One of the most titled mentors in his history, Kurban Berdyev, who returned to the elite of Russian football last year, did not last even six months as head coach of Sochi. Sochi fired the veteran specialist after losing three out of five matches after the restart of the season. At the end of the current championship, the club, which is in the tail of the top ten, will be led by Dmitry Khokhlov, who already has a fairly rich, but not too bright experience in the Russian Premier League (RPL).

A day after the defeat in the 22nd round of the championship at home from Krylya Sovetov – 1: 2 – Sochi announced about the resignation of head coach Kurban Berdyev, thanking him for “the joint work done” and wishing him good luck “in his future career and throughout his life.” The period of “joint work” between the Sochi club and the 70-year-old coach turned out to be, I must say, very short-lived.

Kurban Berdyev appeared in it at the end of last year, and it was a very significant event. In the previous season, Sochi under the leadership of Vladimir Fedotov made a breakthrough, taking second place in the championship. But then Fedotov gone at CSKA. vacated position took Vadim Garanin, who came from the second-ranking division and, due to the lack of a license of the highest category, received the formal status of a senior coach. However, in early November, Sochi fired Garanin amid failures in both domestic tournaments. In the championship, the club went to the winter break, occupying the ninth position, and in the cup it ended up on the bottom, fourth line in the table of its group and ahead of schedule lost the chances of continuing the fight in the playoffs. Instead of Garanin by Sochi for some time supervised Alexander Tochilin, and then their management chose, perhaps, the most curious of the available options.

Kurban Berdyev is one of the most famous and titled specialists who have ever worked in domestic football. The biggest and best part of his coaching career has been with Rubin.

At one time, he brought the Kazan club to the top division, and then turned it into one of the leaders of the RPL. With Berdyev, Rubin won gold in the Russian championship twice, in 2008 and 2009, won the Russian Cup in 2012, and once managed to defeat Barcelona in the Champions League.

Very productively Kurban Berdyev also led Rostov, which, before his arrival eight years ago, was an average player, and together with the new coach, he sharply improved and even won the silver of the Russian championship in 2016. After that, Berdyev, however, parted ways with the Rostovites – due to a conflict with the club management.

Then Berdyev returned to Rubin, but he could not achieve new successes in Kazan. And since 2021, the veteran coach has worked exclusively abroad, and in the championships of a not very high level – first in the Kazakh “Kairat”, then in the Iranian “Tractor”.

In Sochi, he lasted less than six months, and most of this segment fell on the period of winter training.

In the Russian championship, after its restart, the Sochi team under the leadership of Kurban Berdyev played only five matches. Their results are strange.

Sochi defeated two strong Moscow clubs – CSKA and Dynamo, but even before the “Wings of the Soviets” hopelessly, 0:4 and 0:3, lost to the middle peasants – Orenburg and Fakel.

Instead of Kurban Berdyev, the team, which occupies the ninth place in the national championship without any special chances to rise fundamentally higher, at the end of the season will be coached by Dmitry Khokhlov, who has been part of its headquarters since January. The 47-year-old Khokhlov, of course, does not have such a rich coaching biography as his predecessor, but he managed to work hard as a mentor in the clubs of the Russian Premier League. In the middle of the last decade, Khokhlov headed Kuban for about three months, and in 2017 he was entrusted with a radical “reformatting” that had survived in connection with the sanctions of the Union of European Football Associations and even relegated to the second-ranking Dynamo division. Under Dmitry Khokhlov, it had mediocre performance. And at the time of the resignation of the coach in the fall of 2019, the Dynamo players fell into the “relegation zone”.

Alexey Dospekhov