And defeated Metallurg on the road

Russian ice hockey championship

The first matches of the 1/2 finals took place last weekend. On Saturday, “Salavat Yulaev” dealt with “Ak Bars” 3:0 on their ice, and on Sunday “Lokomotiv” beat “Metallurg” 2:0 in a difficult away match.

The pair “Salavat Yulaev” - “Ak Bars” was potentially worthy of the championship final, but due to the fact that the Kazan team took only seventh place at the end of the regular championship, the two teams with the most stellar selection of players in the super league had to clash already in semi-final play-off.

In the starting lineups of the teams, eight hockey players took to the ice of the Ufa Arena, who last year defended the colors of Ak Bars. Only this time, four of them were in the starting five of Salavat Yulaev.

From the first minutes of the meeting, it became clear that neither the Kazan nor the Ufa residents intended to force events. “Salavat Yulaev” is characterized by such a wait-and-see tactic, while “Ak Bars”, who prefers to spend more time in attack, was clearly afraid of the enemy. The teams tried to play extremely closely and toughly with the opponent, but at the same time not rudely. It is not surprising that there was only one sending off in the first half (Ak Bars), but the Ufa team did not take advantage of this chance, failing to even make a dangerous shot on goal.

The second period would have been no different from the first if Salavat Yulaev had not scored as many as three goals. First, in the fourth minute, Ruslan Nurtdinov caught Kazan goalkeeper Robert Ash by surprise with a long-range throw, and by the middle of the period, Alexey Medvedev, after a luxurious pass from Kirill Koltsov, doubled the score. A two-goal advantage in such a match was already a significant claim to victory, but what finally finished off the guests was a moment that happened at the very end of the period. Salavat Yulaev forward Andrei Sidyakin fell face-to-face with Ash, but the Kazan goalkeeper parried the shot to the side. The hosts' forward, by inertia, rolled into the patch, where he seemed to be pushed into the goal by the Ak Bars defender. And the puck that flew off Robert Ash was finished off into the goal by second line center forward Michal Mikeska. The referee counted the goal, and 20 seconds later the teams went for a break. To win back three goals from Salavat Yulaev on his court in one period is hardly a feasible task, even for a team like Ak Bars. In the final 20 minutes, the Ufa team competently blocked all approaches to Alexander Eremenko’s goal and naturally brought the match to victory.

The match in Magnitogorsk differed favorably from the game in Ufa. From the very beginning of the meeting, Lokomotiv did not want to give up the initiative to Metallurg, weakened by injuries to Yaroslav Kudrny and key defender Vitaly Atyushov, and in the opening minutes the fight took place in every part of the site. The teams were in no way inferior to each other, so the period turned out to be equal: by the middle of the match, the opponents earned one penalty each and once each seriously disturbed the goalkeepers - Yaroslavl Semyon Varlamov and Magnitogorsk Travis Scott, but they confidently parried the shots.

The beginning of the second period was left to Lokomotiv, or rather, to Alexei Yashin’s three, which pretty much battered Metallurg’s defense. In the eighth minute, Alexander Vasyunov broke through the right flank into the Urals zone, but the visiting defender began to push the attacker to the boards in time. Out of desperation, Yaroslavl threw with an awkward hand towards the hosts' goal, but for some reason Travis Scott decided to kick the throw like a footballer and missed the puck under his skate. "Metallurg", enraged by this development of events, rushed into the attack, and the defense of "Lokomotiv", led by Semyon Varlamov, who made several excellent saves, had difficulty holding back the onslaught of the hosts. The situation reached a boiling point when Ivan Nepryaev received a two-minute suspension at the end of the second period. The Urals besieged the Yaroslavl team for so long that they couldn’t even change players. However, the young goalkeeper of the Russian national team once again saved Lokomotiv from a couple of sure goals.

For the third period, Metallurg no longer had enough strength. This is hardly surprising, since the play-off schedule is designed in such a way that teams play with virtually no breaks. “Magnitka” generally played 11 matches in 19 days, and Yaroslavl played 2 fewer matches in the same period of time. And the railway workers had a few more days to rest before this meeting. As a result, the freshness of the Lokomotiv players played a decisive role in the third period. The hooked Metallurg hockey players could no longer put as much pressure on Varlamov’s goal as they had in the second period. And the railwaymen coped with Metallurg’s positional attack without any problems. Lokomotiv, having completely exhausted the Urals with its agile and disciplined defense (not a single penalty in the final period), doubled the score at the end of the meeting: Alexey Yashin sent the puck into the empty net (Valery Postnikov removed the goalkeeper for the decisive attack). The Yaroslavl team exemplarily executed the game plan of their head coach Kari Heikkilä, who once again built the game on counterattacks, and achieved a well-deserved victory.

Petr Kommersant-Kuznetsov

Lokomotiv gained strength in defense