Who will win the Gagarin Cup final: “Equal teams have met, the whole struggle is ahead”

Fedor Kanareikin – about the confrontation between CSKA and Ak Bars

MK expert, champion of the USSR as a hockey player and champion of Russia as a coach, Fedor Kanareikin – about the bright confrontation between Kazan’s Ak Bars and CSKA in the decisive series of Gagarin Cup matches.

Since the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) appeared, and the main trophy in the post-Soviet space was named after the first cosmonaut of the planet, the teams have held many bright finals. In which there were not only the obvious favorites of the season, but also the so-called dark horses.

Suffice it to recall the presence in the final series not only, for example, of Omsk Avangard, Moscow Dynamo, Magnitogorsk Metallurg and St. Petersburg SKA, but also, for example, Mytishchi Atlant ”, now quite successfully fighting for the Petrov Cup in our second most important league – the highest?), As well as those who died in the bose of the Prague “Lion” and the Balashikha HC MVD …

But lately there have been less and less such surprises: as a rule, only oligarch clubs get to the finals of not only the main, but also the decisive series of conferences. So it was this season: SKA against CSKA, Avangard against Ak Bars. And the fact that Muscovites and Kazan met in the final is also logical. Perhaps this is exactly the two most stable clubs at the moment, which have dealt with internal troubles in time, if I may say so.

And to assess the start of the final series of the Gagarin Cup (4:1 in favor of Kazan) we are ready to help the permanent expert of “MK”, ​​2-time world champion among youth teams in the USSR national team and the winner of the championship of the Union as a Spartak hockey player, the champion of Russia as Metallurg Magnitogorsk head coach Fyodor Kanareikin:

“The series opened with a match in Kazan: this game ended with a rather logical victory for the hosts. Ak Bars was more concentrated, more aimed at the goal, won a lot of martial arts… In many respects, the game in incomplete squads decided everything: first, Kazan scored the puck, playing with four, then the majority converted.

These key moments played a decisive role. As for CSKA, I will say that the red-blues were not as concentrated as in the last games of the previous series against SKA and in the series before that.

Psychological emasculation? No, I don’t think… The army team had enough time to recover.

But in general, I note that equal teams met in the final, the whole struggle is ahead. The game on Wednesday will be very interesting, CSKA should appear as a different team, more charged to win!”