“Torpedo” changed the savior – Newspaper Kommersant No. 191 (7392) dated 10/14/2022

Torpedo Moscow, which is in last place after 12 rounds of the Russian Championship, will try to save itself from relegation from the Russian Premier League with the help of a new head coach – already the third in the starting segment of this season. Andrey Talalaev, who has extensive experience working with domestic middle peasants and outsiders, was unexpectedly fired from Akhmat in September.

Moscow “Torpedo”, which this season returned to the top Russian football division after a seven-year break, announced appointment new head coach. Andrey Talalaev became them. He will be the third Torpedo mentor in the current championship, despite the fact that only 12 rounds have been played in it.

They opened the championship with Alexander Borodyuk. “Torpedo” broke up with him after five rounds, gaining only a point in them. After that, the team was led by a tandem of coaches. Formally, Nikolai Savichev was the main one, but in fact, the duties of the head of the coaching staff were performed by Nikolai Kovardaev, who previously coached Torpedo-2, who does not have a Pro license. Under Kovardaev, who will now again lead the second team of the club, and Savichev, Torpedo, who lost four matches in a row after Borodyuk’s resignation, managed to get five points in the next three rounds, defeating CSKA and drawing with Fakel and Paris Nizhny Novgorod. However, despite these successes, his tournament position remains sad. Torpedovtsy are on the lowest, 16th, line of the standings.

Explaining the motives for the appointment of Andrei Talalaev, the president of Torpedo, Ilya Gerkus, drew attention, among other things, to the fact that he is associated with the club “historically”.

Andrey Talalaev is indeed a graduate of the capital’s team and in the 1990s he played for it for several seasons as a forward. But in this case, it is most likely that the coaching background of the 50-year-old Talalaev is more important.

He began his coaching career at the end of the 1990s, and soon ended up in the RFU system: he was trusted by the youth and youth teams of the country. In the past decade, Talalaev retrained as a club coach. He did not have a chance to work in the elite teams, but he gained a wealth of experience in clubs that do not have solid resources, whose goal was either to break into the elite or maintain a residence permit in it. Andrei Talalaev coped with such tasks with varying degrees of success. For example, he did not save the Volga Nizhny Novgorod from falling into the second-ranking division, the FNL, but with Tambov and Khimki he almost reached the Russian Premier League (RPL).

In 2020 Andrey Talalaev turned out to be in “Wings of the Soviets”. Samarans also flew to the FNL with him, but Talalaev’s fault in this case was minimal. “Wings”, replacing Miodrag Bozovic, he took in June, that is, at the finish line of the championship extended due to the coronavirus pandemic, when they were already in a critical situation. At the same time, in a number of matches, the Samara team showed a rather convincing and interesting game.

The previous place of work of Andrey Talalaev was already the eternal Russian middle peasant Akhmat, where he moved immediately after the parting of the Wings of the Soviets from the RPL. In the previous season, the Grozny club finished seventh in the championship. He was higher in the final classification of the championship only once in his history – when he closed the top five in 2017.

The dismissal of Andrei Talalaev from Akhmat was announced on September 11, a day after the match of the ninth round with Pari Nizhny Novgorod.

Grozny lost in it to rivals in their field – 1:3, but the tournament situation, let’s say, did not scream about the need for the urgent resignation of the coach. “Akhmat” as a whole performed at the usual level. A number of sources suggested that it was caused by a conflict between a specialist and club management, and championat.com even claimed that Talalaev was expelled right during the break of the meeting with the Nizhny Novgorod residents after a “tough” conversation with one of the leaders of the Grozny residents.

The first match in the status of the head coach of Torpedo, who hopes to survive in the RPL, Andrey Talalaev will play on Saturday. And it will be an extremely principled game. The Torpedo team will host Lokomotiv, which also urgently needs to get out of a deep crisis. The railroad workers, who survived a series of failures and recently said goodbye to head coach Josef Zinnbauer, are two lines higher than the torpedo team, and only three points separate the teams.

Alexey Dospekhov