Simple arithmetic

Friedrichshafen dealt with Dynamo according to the proven scheme

A participant in the Final Four of the Champions League in the previous two seasons, the capital's Dynamo has stopped fighting for the trophy in the current edition. The change of head coach that took place in the summer, when instead of Vladimir Alekno, who had left for the Russian national team, who led the “blue and white” to the top four clubs on the continent in 2006 and 2007, the team was led by the Italian Daniele Bagnoli, did not bring results. Yesterday, Dynamo's fate was sealed after the first game of the return match of the Round of Twelve against the German Friedrichshafen. On the road, the Muscovites lost 0:3, and on Wednesday they were defeated in the opening set - 25:18. The German club secured passage to the next round in the shortest possible time, and the rest of the match turned into a formality from a sporting point of view. The final score of the match 3:1 in favor of the Muscovites did not bring much joy.

According to a similar scheme (winning at home 3:0 and winning the first game away), Friedrichshafen in the last, triumphant season for it, when the team sensationally became the winner of the Champions League, successively dealt with the Belgian Noliko and the Italian in both rounds of the playoffs "Sisley." By the way, the team from Treviso was led by none other than the current Dynamo coach Bagnoli.

Prior to this, Sisley, under Bagnoli, had repeatedly failed in the Champions League, reaching the Final Four in the spring of 2006 only due to the fact that the club was chosen to host the decisive stage of the competition and was automatically exempt from the playoffs. In the 2001/02 season, Sisley did not even make it out of the group stage, having suffered two painful defeats in its quartet from the capital's MSTU-Luzhniki Yuri Nechushkin. A year later, Bagnoli’s mood on the sum of two meetings of the “Round of Six” was spoiled by the French “Tour” of the current coach of the Russian national team, Vladimir Alekno. In March 2005, Sisley lost all chances of reaching the Final Four after the first match with Gennady Shipulin's Lokomotiv-Belogorye - 0:3 and a terrible "minus 27" on points in the first game. Now for the second year in a row Bagnoli became a victim of Stelian Moculescu and his Friedrichshafen.

This German team is a strong and good team, but Russian clubs have always defeated Friedrichshafen before. This season, the Dynamo-TTG volleyball players of Viktor Sidelnikov prevailed over Moculescu's charges - 3:2 in Kazan and 3:1 in Germany. Two years ago, Friedrichshafen, again in the group stage, was twice defeated by the capital’s Dynamo Vladimir Alekno, and already in the playoffs it suffered from Shipulin’s Belgorod squad. It was only with Bagnoli that the Russian Champions League participant could not cope with the team from a small town on the shores of Lake Constance.

At the start of the season, Dynamo put together an impressive series of victories in official matches, which did not lead to anything. At the end of December, the “blue and white” lost to “Dynamo-TTG” in the Russian Cup final, now they are beaten by “Friedrichshafen”, and recently suffered a fiasco in a game with one of the outsiders of the super league “Yaroslavich”. The team seems to have no inner core. The very first misfire caused a chain reaction and gave rise to a lot of other failures.

Having virtually the core of the Russian national team at his disposal (Sergei Grankin, Alexey Ostapenko. Alexander Volkov, Semyon Poltavsky, Yuri Berezhko), Bagnoli was unable to prepare his team for yesterday's match. The Blue and White needed to win all three games with a total goal difference of plus 12, but in the first set they received minus 7. Having solved the tournament problem, the Friedrichshafen volleyball players continued to play with smiles on their faces and without particularly straining, Moculescu gave the deaf reservists the opportunity to try their hand. A sad ending to the European Cup campaign for the Russian vice-champion.

Ilya TRISVIATSKY