At the beginning of this season in the KHL everything was going suspiciously well. In the regular season there is a close fight, and even all SKA’s tricks with the trips of newcomers to the Leningrad region have not yet helped them create a super team in the style of 2017. CSKA’s management and return of North American players to the The now independent KHL has not yet provoked any reaction from the IIHF. Finally, in terms of infrastructure, the league will soon say goodbye to the last Soviet palaces in Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Novgorod, and there will be no 20th century stadiums left in the league.
However, the last 24 hours suddenly produced a hat-trick of events that seemed to take us back to the early KHL seasons. One: Michal Krystof, who was often in Sochi’s rotation this season, voluntarily joined the Swiss league. Two: The Amur match is postponed for two hours, literally, due to a hole in the ice. Three: Barys gets his third head coach in a month and a half, and if we count and. Oh, so actually the fourth. Today we will talk about the Astana Club, where he clearly got carried away by the thirst for self-destruction.
We wrote about the situation in Barys at the end of September after the resignation of David Nemirovski, but nothing changed for the better afterwards. The effect of Vyacheslav Butsaev’s arrival was enough for two minimal victories over the league’s poorest club, Sochi, and the crisis-ridden Avangard, but little changed in the game. “Barys” began to play very conservatively, as if returning us to the league of ten years ago, where the pressing teams seemed surprisingly fresh and unusual.
Little has changed in Barys since September:
Barys fired the coach after only seven games! This solution is a consequence of long-standing problems.
The main event surrounding Barys in September was the leak of a video of general manager Oleg Bolyakin communicating with fans somewhere near the arena. The video was heavily enriched with profanity and its essence boiled down to one simple thing: Nemirovsky was brought in with “illiquid assets”; the opinion of the general director was not taken into account here; Bolyakin also put forward a certain “positive program” in something like this: “I agreed with Ufa about the transfer of Melosh, with Minsk about the transfer of Merkley, but…” These words sound quite realistic; However, judging by Merkley’s performance in Yekaterinburg, it is difficult to say that he would have helped Barys.
Oleg Bolyakin
Photo: Dmitry Soroka, foto.khl.ru
Immediately after Nemirovsky left, Bolyakin apparently already brought those he wanted. And in a vacuum, these transfers still cannot be considered bad. Are Stanislav Bocharov and Nikita Setdikov inferior to Zhafyarov and Burdasov in reputation and name? Yes. Are they inferior in terms of performance specifically last season? No. The Korshkov – Barulin – Bocharov trio was almost the best in the second part of the KHL season; Setdikov scored 33 points in 62 games, playing last year for teams outside the playoff zone. However, it was difficult to imagine that these players would take and turn around Barys’ season, especially considering that the club’s foreign players initially did not look like people who could become leaders at the KHL level.
Related materials
Exclusive
Babaev – about Bolyakin’s words about illiquid assets in Barys: I don’t care who says what
The injuries suffered by many players also did not help the Astana Club: in fact, Barys did not play a single game with its optimal lineup. In just a month and a half, 36 field hockey players managed to play in Barys, and recently the Club managed to arrange the transfer of Ivan Nikolishin, who has not yet made his debut with the new team. This transition, apparently, was the last in Bolyakin’s managerial career: first the general director Boris Ivanishchev left the club, and now, apparently, the general director himself.
Now Nurlan Orazbayev has returned to Barys for the third time. It was under him that the Astana club began playing in the KHL, and Orazbayev controlled the team’s selection policy. It was then that Barys brought the legendary line Dawes – Boyd – Bochenski, Kevin Dallman, Josef Stumpel, Lukas Kaspar and many other famous foreigners to the KHL. Of course, there were failures and the names of the failed players have already been forgotten, but we can still agree that this was the most stable time for Barys.
In 2012, Orazbayev was dismissed from Barys: then the head of the club was also the general director of the national team, which was relegated from the World Cup elite. A year later, however, the president returned, and it was in the 2013/2014 season that Barys showed the best result in history at that time, taking second place in the East and reaching the second round. In the spring of 2015, Orazbayev left again, publicly explaining this management decision due to his reluctance to renew the contract with Andrei Nazarov, who moved to SKA that spring. After that, the official’s name did not appear in hockey news at all.
Consequently, Orazbayev’s appointment can be perceived with optimism: after all, after 2015, the life of “Barys” turned into continuous adventures with small bright spots. However, the first decision of the new management, apparently, will be a sharp separation of all foreign actors. This was first reported by Telegram’s internal channels and recently confirmed by Orazbayev at the first press conference.
The favorite pastime of some local sports media is kicking foreign players and counting the money they receive. Of course, it was not always foreigners who brought in Barys, especially since even before 2022 the local management was increasingly failing in his selection. However, let’s imagine that Michael MacLeod had not arrived in Astana and had not been paid 300 million tenge a year. It is unlikely that all this money will go to local children’s hockey, which has been in a big and serious crisis in recent years.
Nurlan Orazbaev
Photo: Yuri Kuzmin, foto.khl.ru
Let us repeat what was said a little earlier: the example of Belarus showed that there is no correlation between the number of foreigners in the country’s main team and the growth of local youth. The young Levshunov, Sharangovich and Pinchuk grew up in the republic in parallel with the processes taking place at Dynamo, where they first signed a dozen foreign players and then introduced an internal limit. Now young Belarusians not only travel around the KHL, but also organically complement the good foreign players of Dynamo. While funds and efforts were being invested in the development of new hockey centers in Belarus, the main Kazakh school in Ust-Kamenogorsk collapsed.
And what is the quality of the local management staff? I remember that a couple of years ago fans highly doubted Yuri Mikhailis’s qualifications, but now his training times seem surprisingly calm. Bolyakin, who had already been dismissed from the club, worked for several years mainly as an assistant coach at local championship clubs before being appointed general manager. Having received the opportunity to work for Barys for the third time, Galym Mambetaliev immediately received a three-year contract, although the previous two opportunities can hardly be considered impressive.
In general, the management of Kazakh hockey needs to clearly understand their wishes. The VHL is also perfect for the development of young local players, where Kazakh clubs performed well before the covid period, but never returned there. First of all, Barys must set goals in the championship. Expecting that local players with a certain cap can only improve by increasing view time to a high level is extremely naive. As an American banker recently said on a completely different occasion: “I am 165 cm tall and 50 years old. “Even if the federal government invests $10 billion in me, I won’t become an NBA star.”
