Translated material
Gold reserve
The Russian Bykov hockey team at the Moscow championship was surprisingly similar in style of play and attitude to the German football team led by Jurgen Klinsmann at last year's world championship. Germany then also failed to take gold at home, limiting itself to bronze, but appeared so lively, bright, spectacular, and attacking that then almost the whole country unanimously persuaded the former wonderful forward, world and European champion, to remain as head coach. Klinsmann, who had been permanently living in the USA for a long time, refused for family reasons, but left his closest assistant and like-minded person Joachim Loew at the head of the team (it’s as if after the world hockey championship Igor Zakharkin began to coach our team). In other words, the new style that revitalized the German football team, which was in stagnation and even decline, will be supported and developed.
Our hockey team, before Vyacheslav Bykov joined it, also, frankly speaking, did not shine. The point is not even that the last and only time in the modern history of Russia we won the World Championship in 1993 and, with very strong squads, we were not able to get Olympic gold either in 2002 or 2006. The fact is that, having the second strongest national championship after the NHL championship, regularly continuing to educate real stars, from time to time winning junior and youth world championships, generally inferior in the quality of young hockey players only to Canadians, Russia has finally turned into the middle peasantry of the so-called “ Big Seven" teams. This elite club of world hockey, in addition to Russia, includes Canada, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Finland, the USA and Slovakia. Yes, only in terms of results at the main tournaments, over the last decade and a half, we have been closer to the USA and Slovakia, and not to Finland, Sweden, the Czech Republic or Canada.
Of course, I want big victories. But to win, you have to play well. In this regard, the Bykov team has become perhaps the best since the collapse of the USSR. From time to time, at world championships and Olympics, the Russians showed great hockey or amazing fortitude (for example, last year in the memorable Olympic quarterfinals with the Canadians), but in order to hold the entire tournament in such a way that no one could be blamed for anything, this did not happen. And in Moscow, despite the disappointing and, in general, undeservedly lost semi-final with the Finns, the Russian team for the first time looked like a team capable of becoming a world leader. In the very literal sense in which the USSR national team was the leader for many years. When any of our defeats or draws were perceived as an unpleasant sensation, as an unfortunate accident, as an exception to the rule.
Agree, we have long lost the habit of perceiving Russian defeats at world championships or the Olympics as something surprising. At the same time, conflicts arose from time to time between players and coaches; hockey players from Russian clubs and NHL clubs did not feel like a single whole in the national team. The unstable play of the national team was a natural consequence of the coaching leapfrog and the lack of a normal atmosphere in the team, and the not very professional leadership of the entire Russian hockey industry.
I would like the leaders of domestic hockey to have a reserve of patience and give carte blanche to the current national team coaches for at least one full Olympic cycle. I would like the current national team coaches to retain a reserve of enthusiasm and determination to instill in the Russian national team their gaming ideas, given the presence in the team of that emotional upsurge that was impossible not to notice at the Moscow World Championship. In this case, we have every chance to replenish our long-not-renewed gold reserve of great hockey victories.