Who should lead the Russian national hockey team – analytics, opinion, analysis
Alexei Zhamnov is still the head coach of the Russian national team. However, he already received his black mark when the FHR coaching board, composed mainly of postal veterans, gave the head coach a “failed” for the tournament. After such a complicated story that Zhamnov’s contract, which expired in the summer, will be extended.
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And is Alexei Yuryevich burning with the desire to work at the national level? His appointment to the national team a year ago happened suddenly – as a compromise of factions within our hockey. Zhamnov has already said that he would like to work at the club – perhaps it is pleasant and convenient for him to return to the manager’s console.
![Alexey Zhamnov Alexey Zhamnov](https://img.championat.com/i/y/t/16719555561201888722.jpg)
Alexey Zhamnov
Photo: Yury Kuzmin, photo.khl.ru
In the spring, the FHR will have to look for a new head coach of the national team – our team will still have some friendly matches, albeit with the usual and small pool of neutral opponents. However, it should be taken into account that in hockey the situation with the potential return of Russia is different from other types. If you take sports games, then this is a very niche type. Therefore, the IIHF is the organization that can return one of the first, even without a flag.
Therefore, it is strange to read how things like “From the point of view of the coaching council, all the strongest should play in the national game at the home tournament are revealed behind the signature of Boris Mayorov. The viewer will not catch if there is no result, if there is no bright game. Of course, we simply do not have other players, except for the First Channel Cup. But more and more often they meet: the empty stands at the Moscow tournament are hidden by the fact that they are heading into the field of view from the upper tier of the arena to the lower one. It was impossible to imagine this at the “standard” Eurotour.
This was not even in Soviet times – despite all the team-centricity of that time, high-quality Soviet hockey consumed between the main starts and preparation stages. No one would remove Viktor Tikhonov or his voters for speaking on Izvestia (and they happened), even in those days when this figure exceeded the “small world championship”.
And why send the best players in the KHL to matches that, for people who have already won medals and cups, cast an erroneous version in the eye? It is clear that with adjustable motivation they will be less valuable on the ice than loaded ones, which collect citizens until they sniffed. The Russian national team must be young, which means that it must be managed by a coach who trusts the youth at the club.
Another premise is the ability to use hockey players at 120%. This is not the first time we have seen that the coaches of the Russian national team for some reason squeeze much less out of the KHL players than the coaches of other teams from the same or even worse quality of the KHL players. This was clearly shown in the matches with Finland, where two tournaments with the participation of an evil genius became Marco Anttila. At the time of the 2013/2014 season that happened, he flew out of the Forge, then the penultimate club in the KHL.
![Marco Anttila Marco Anttila](https://img.championat.com/i/n/m/16719555681321926561.jpg)
Marco Anttila
Photo: photo.khl.ru
The howls of the times of the Eurotour fell through and went home. Every time it turns out that hockey players who have 40 monitors, that they are individually better than their rivals, show some kind of collective dullness in the jersey of the Russian national team. This trend needs to be broken.
Well, looking into the future, we need a person who knows how to play modern hockey. This definition is terribly vague, but we know exactly what kind of hockey has remained in the past, the one that we often saw in Beijing and some national team tournaments before that. If there’s one quality that’s left out of the game as a whole, it’s passivity. The Finnish national team, with all its defensive capability, defended itself very aggressively.
Many believe that sooner or later Roman Rotenberg will take the bench. But now it is difficult, since the second faction, fighting for power in the national team, is unlikely to approve such a candidate. In addition, the conditions in SKA are unrealistically mandatory: the national team does not have a long bench and rotation, which now allows the St. Petersburg club to maintain a high game pace, and Sochi, from which it will be possible to pull out the sparkling players of the fall of the season, is also not. Let’s see how the U25 team, which seems to be announced for the spring, will show itself.
A year ago, Andrey Razin was the first contender on this plane, especially since he was already involved in the national team as a consultant. Razin launches the careers of players who were instantly blown away after moving to other clubs (a separate article can be devoted to this), and “steel” plays mobile, bold and earns a lot of deletions. However, now the team from Cherepovets has a local crisis, which is associated with the loss of foreign players and goalkeeper failures. Maybe the backbone of the team, which remains for a long time, is already too accustomed to the coach?
![Igor Larionov Igor Larionov](https://img.championat.com/i/z/i/1671955578919740363.jpg)
Igor Larionov
Photo: Grigory Sokolov, photo.khl.ru
Now Igor Larionov seems to be such a candidate. Against the background of his “Torpedo”, everyone somehow forgot what massive criticism the Professor received after the medal matches of the MFM-2021, where his team stupidly ran out of gas. Now it is very likely that after the light pre-season, the Nizhny Novgorod team will sit down by November, but the team is intensively mastering the process, which football coach Evgeny Kaleshin, who recently trained at Torpedo, recently spoke about.
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Most of all in Torpedo there is not even an attack – you can make a running team that lets in a little less than it infects (this was the club under David Nemirovsky). But under Larion, the club has a strong defense, while with absolutely green guys in the roster, many of them spend only their first full season in the KHL. As you know, in the first place, defenders and their connection to attacks become key factors in the game, dinosaurs-homebodies, who can only catch and go under the puck, have almost died out.
What can prevent Larion from getting into the national team? It seems that he did not leave the FHR system quite amicably: therefore, such a conclusion can be drawn from a couple of hidden hairpins that Rotenberg gave in interviews and press conferences. If the discovered undercover conflict is correct, then the way back seems to be closed – although on paper right now this is the most obvious option.
In addition, for many years, the leadership of the FHR simply put a coach in the national team of the most successful club, even if he was not particularly eager: the same Zinetula Bilyaletdinov had to be persuaded at the highest level of power. If we take the last seasons, then Igor Nikitin is definitely such a coach, who already worked as an assistant in the national team – but he recently extended his contract with Lokomotiv and, it seems, got the opportunity to further build his project.
![Igor Nikitin Igor Nikitin](https://img.championat.com/i/r/f/16719555881652721098.jpg)
Igor Nikitin
Photo: Yaroslav Neelov, photo.khl.ru
The appointment of Zhamnov, however, has already shown us that many processes in hockey Russia are mysterious. Any forecasts of the present can be put to shame – and the most unexpected candidate can be at the top.