And yet the Swedes

Vladimir Mozgovoy about the World Hockey Championship

It was easier to climb the southern tower of the Cologne Cathedral (503 steps) or go around all 12 Romanesque churches than to live the last minutes of the match with Canadians. But on the Finns in the game for bronze, the Russians went out to sleep in full.

The Russian team has recently become a team for comforting final. You can take out the annoyance on a weakly modified opponent, and improve statistics and report to the heads of the country with pride - so they say, preparations for the Olympic Pyeongchang go according to plan, the fourth year in a row - with medals, we have a good team, but we were just unlucky.

True, they almost missed the bronze - when the Finnish team in the first minutes of the final period played three goals and took off the goalkeeper three minutes before the siren. But - carried. And that the main matches are losing from year to year, so there is a universal answer to this: "This is a sport." And do not climb into the soul to the coach with stupid questions on the topic "Why?" Yes, "why? Oleg Valerievich Znarok will still not answer anything, and even worse just nahamite, which happens to the Ust-Katava native and a German citizen more and more often.

It is difficult to communicate with a person who sees a catch in the most innocent issue, not to mention the sick issues, which also must be answered with dignity. Half of the players of this team - and maybe more than half - will not be able to go to Pyeongchang. All the conversations about the composition of “under Pyeongchang” remained conversations, and a number of hockey players were gathering to North America exactly after Gennady Timchenko said large hockey authority that money was nothing, and patriotism is everything. Since Timchenko, Rotenbergs and the company have taken up hockey (as if they had nothing else to do), only one structure will not degrade - St. Petersburg SKA. The main goal of the season was the conquest of the Gagarin Cup with wards of Gazprom - there is definitely a connection between this fact and the third place of the national team.

To the question of whether bronze medals are failure, I will answer simply: this is luck for the poor, and not for the team that the third year PR is frantically and without any measure, and the ambitions of which are extended - there is nowhere higher. Since then the label “Red Machine was hung on the team. A new assembly ”, the national team not only did not take a single title - she was not close to him in the game. Too many words about patriotism, too little real business.

One fact that the foundation of this time is really a good and truly young national team are natives and pupils of the Russian hockey province-from Komsomolsk-on-Amur to Cherepovets, from Khabarovsk to Penza, says what to do and whom to support. And do not scold unrealistic money into the so -called basic club of the national team, which has already deprived the internal championship of real competition, and at the international level did not bring special dividends either.

No, something is wrong with our hockey, and with the team-as its exhibition option-too. The least reproaches to hockey players - they play as they can, but other actions of the leading composition can not be called a wreck. Well, who drove the two chiefs in Sochi in the Gala Match of the Night League tournament right in the middle of the World Cup-would this event be without Roman Rotenberg and Alexei Zhamanov? What, once again, going on the ice with the great scorer Vladimir Putin is so more important than the affairs of the national team leading the struggle for the medal? Well, when in Cologne for training, albeit reserve, but quite official, Rotenberg Jr. comes out as a participant, it becomes clear that it is probably impossible to humiliate the institute of the national team.

Of course, these are all details that are not directly related to the game. How is not related to the game of the Roster-imperial style of a fairly large part of Russian fans, exposing the “True Patriotism”, to which the price is a muffled price. A hockey person is not a model of behavior, but only in the Russian performance, cattle is generously seasoned with patriotic attributes, from which it is already sick. Therefore, I was not very upset that I spent a certain part of the time at the championship without contacts with compatriots - there were fewer negative emotions and more just hockey.

The Russian team, which lost only two meetings (and both by the North American team), left the impression of an interesting and talented, but not ready to really fight the team. She received too many advances, deserved a solid four for the tournament, but she certainly did not play the five. She easily dealt with those who are lower than the class, but kept a bad blow. Her two players were honored to get into the top three - according to the directorate, and in the top five - according to journalists - goalkeeper Andrei Vasilevsky and striker Artemy Panarin. But they would change these valuable individual prizes to the championship without hesitation.

Part of the fault for the two most important defeats, of course, should have taken upon himself the head coach, but Oleg Znarok does not receive such questions with attention, this is not the royal case - to be explained.

... there was a grandmaster finale, and I was sad. Not from the fact that ours were not - they did not deserve, and not from the fact that Sweden and Canada rested their foreheads at each other, they played out to overtime and should have been determined only to midnight with the championship.

It is sad that all this festival, no matter how long it lasts, ends. It was a strange championship-maybe the most strange of all 16 on which I worked directly.

And it ended quite non -trivial - with post -match throws. When Henrik Lundquist threw up the tested goalkeeper hands to the sky, this meant that the third consecutive championship was not given to Canada, and the night in Cologne, which did not promise to be languid, was painted in yellow Swedish tones.