Ak Bars vs SKA. How will a visit to Kazan turn out for the championship leader?
Kazan's Ak Bars, which is in distress, will host St. Petersburg's SKA on November 17 at home. The meeting with the sole leader of the championship will take place on the ice of the Kazan Tatneft Arena.
It is the Kazan club that should be recognized as the main disappointment of the first part of the regular championship. Before the start of the championship, most experts called Ak Bars the main favorite of the tournament, at least in terms of names the team was not inferior to anyone in the League. In fact, the Ak Bars project with the involvement of age stars fails miserably, and the bet on Oleg Znark did not work either, who, according to general impressions, completely lost control over his wards. Rare flashes of a successful game are replaced by a hopeless series of gray matches in which the team is not happy with either the game in attack or in defense.
It would seem that Bars groped their game in early November, scoring two wins in a row over Salavat Yulaev 2-1 and Severstal 4-3. But already in the next matches, everything returned to normal, three defeats in a row (from Neftekhimik 3-4, Torpedo 4-6 and Avangard 3-4) and talk about the revival of Ak Bars was clearly premature. We are not talking about the championship at the moment, Barça risk being left without the playoffs if the team does not start to score points steadily in the near future. Now Ak Bars is only seventh in the East, with 29 points scored two points ahead of the ninth Chelyabinsk Traktor.
SKA
If Ak Bars is more and more disappointing, then SKA, on the contrary, gave out an excellent starting segment, already after a third of the championship, it was seriously breaking away from its direct competitors. After two starting months of the championship, the army team had only two defeats with 22 victories. It was clear that at some point a certain decline in the game will occur, for the St. Petersburg team this happened during the guest trip Vladivostok-Khabarovsk-Novosibirsk. It would seem that they are not the most formidable rivals, but the army team managed to bring only one point from this trip, catching a draw in regular time in the match against Amur. Three defeats in a row did not particularly change the tournament disposition of the St. Petersburg club, SKA is still leading not only in the Western Conference, but also in the KHL consolidated standings, with 52 points ahead of the nearest pursuer by 11 points at once.
A certain problem for SKA can be a large number of injured hockey players. The list of injured soldiers currently includes Galimov, Nikolaev, Pashnin, Shvets-Rogovoy, Tsitsyura. The situation with the goalkeepers is not clear, Dmitry Nikolaev continues to recover, while just the other day the SKA management exchanged Alexander Samonov for Severstal goalkeeper Vladislav Podyapolsky. So it is quite likely that in the game against Ak Bars, 18-year-old Sergey Ivanov will take the place at the gates of the St. Petersburg club.
Our Expert Predictions & Analysis on Ak Bars vs SKA
Ak BarsIt is the Kazan club that should be recognized as the main disappointment of the first part of the regular championship. Before the start of the championship, most experts called Ak Bars the main favorite of the tournament, at least in terms of names the team was not inferior to anyone in the League. In fact, the Ak Bars project with the involvement of age stars fails miserably, and the bet on Oleg Znark did not work either, who, according to general impressions, completely lost control over his wards. Rare flashes of a successful game are replaced by a hopeless series of gray matches in which the team is not happy with either the game in attack or in defense.
It would seem that Bars groped their game in early November, scoring two wins in a row over Salavat Yulaev 2-1 and Severstal 4-3. But already in the next matches, everything returned to normal, three defeats in a row (from Neftekhimik 3-4, Torpedo 4-6 and Avangard 3-4) and talk about the revival of Ak Bars was clearly premature. We are not talking about the championship at the moment, Barça risk being left without the playoffs if the team does not start to score points steadily in the near future. Now Ak Bars is only seventh in the East, with 29 points scored two points ahead of the ninth Chelyabinsk Traktor.
SKA
If Ak Bars is more and more disappointing, then SKA, on the contrary, gave out an excellent starting segment, already after a third of the championship, it was seriously breaking away from its direct competitors. After two starting months of the championship, the army team had only two defeats with 22 victories. It was clear that at some point a certain decline in the game will occur, for the St. Petersburg team this happened during the guest trip Vladivostok-Khabarovsk-Novosibirsk. It would seem that they are not the most formidable rivals, but the army team managed to bring only one point from this trip, catching a draw in regular time in the match against Amur. Three defeats in a row did not particularly change the tournament disposition of the St. Petersburg club, SKA is still leading not only in the Western Conference, but also in the KHL consolidated standings, with 52 points ahead of the nearest pursuer by 11 points at once.
A certain problem for SKA can be a large number of injured hockey players. The list of injured soldiers currently includes Galimov, Nikolaev, Pashnin, Shvets-Rogovoy, Tsitsyura. The situation with the goalkeepers is not clear, Dmitry Nikolaev continues to recover, while just the other day the SKA management exchanged Alexander Samonov for Severstal goalkeeper Vladislav Podyapolsky. So it is quite likely that in the game against Ak Bars, 18-year-old Sergey Ivanov will take the place at the gates of the St. Petersburg club.
Comments 0