The Russian team lost in a neighborly way – Sport – Kommersant
[ad_1]
The Russian team failed to win the traditional Channel One Cup hockey tournament, which also included national teams from Kazakhstan and Belarus. This was her first performance after a long break due to suspension from official international competitions. After a confident victory over the Kazakhs, the Russians lost to the Belarusians. The main time of the match ended with a score of 4:4, and everything was decided in a shootout – 0:1. The cup went to the Belarusian team.
Despite the exclusion of Russia from the international hockey calendar, including the Eurotour, which previously hosted the Channel One Cup, the traditional tournament, which has been played since 2006, still took place. Yes, now it was not the Swedes, Czechs and Finns who came to Moscow, but the rivals of a significantly lower class, but in the circumstances this was a pretty good option. Moreover, the Kazakh national team, after all, participated in the last World Cup, and the Belarusian team, along with the Russian one, was not allowed to participate only for political reasons.
For the Russian team, the current Channel One Cup was the first tournament after the Olympic Games in Beijing, that is, in the last ten months. And although the coaching staff, headed by Alexei Zhamnov, attracted several players from the team that won silver, many newcomers received an invitation. The goalkeeper team has been completely renewed, and its backbone was Maxim Dorozhko from Vityaz and Nikita Serebryakov from Admiral, the unexpected leaders of the current regular season of the Continental Hockey League in terms of the percentage of reflected shots.
Not all candidates were allowed to play by health, and the participation of such KHL stars as Vyacheslav Voinov, Alexander Radulov, Vadim Shipachev or Nikita Gusev was not even expected, nevertheless, the team was quite powerful.
In particular, the coaches put together a new promising link, adding Ilya Safonov and Maxim Dzhioshvili to Dmitry Voronkov, who has already proven himself in the national team. Each of them has a grenadier height of 190 cm and a combat weight of 90 kg, and this trio brilliantly coped with the role of a shock ram in the match with Kazakhstan, organizing three goals out of six.
And if the double of Voronkov, who is already expected in the National Hockey League, hardly surprised anyone, then the goal and assist of the debutant Dzhioshvili especially pleased Zhamnov. Despite the fact that the Dynamo Moscow striker is 26 years old, he spends his first full season in the KHL and immediately attracted attention. The debut of the goalkeeper Dorozhko also came out quite creditable. True, for the sake of justice, it must be said that the Kazakh team failed to provide stubborn resistance to the Russians and lost 2:6. And earlier, she was defeated by the Belarusians – 1:4.
Here is the final match of the Russia-Belarus tournament, in which the main prize was at stake, had a much more intriguing character. The team of Canadian specialist Craig Woodcroft, who heads Dynamo Minsk and its base club, not only imposed a tight fight on the ice owners from the first shifts, but also kept this level in the future.
No matter how hard Zhamnov’s wards tried to crush the enemy, he did not break down and retained a coherent system of play.
The starting period, thanks to Maxim Mamin, ended in a draw – 1: 1, then Safonov brought the Russians ahead for the first time, and when it seemed that now they would no longer give up the advantage, the Belarusians used the numerical majority twice in a row.
Maybe those deletions looked far-fetched, the implementation of the excess was almost perfect. In the third twenty-minute period, Alexander Kadeikin equalized the score, when the Russian team again stepped up the pressure, but the guests scored in the minority and took the lead 4:3. Kadeikin, like a real captain in a difficult situation, scored a double, after which the hosts could still snatch the victory in regular time if they had not continued to squander scoring chances.
And in overtime, the Russians missed a great opportunity to decide everything in their favor, when Voronkov forced the opponent to foul on himself. However, they failed to distinguish themselves in the four-on-three format, and as a result, the winner of the Channel One Cup had to be identified in a shootout. Zhamnov, after consulting with assistants, replaced the goalkeeper, and instead of Serebryakov, Dorozhko stood in the frame. However, that was not the problem.
The attackers did not realize any of the five shots, although Sergei Tolchinsky, who got into the frame, was frankly unlucky.
But the naturalized American Shane Prince, who now plays for Spartak Moscow, scored and brought victory to the Belarusians. Thus, the Russian team lost the match, in which they threw the opponent 45:18.
[ad_2]
Source link