Sochi have built a strong team, but lose a lot. Does Kokorev lose the team out of control?
August 26, 2023
The coach started the off-season happily, but now his technique only harms the Club with a very strong squad.
Contrasts out of season are absolutely normal and, moreover, it is not usual to draw conclusions based on summer test matches. However, it is one thing when we talk, for example, about Barys, who after four defeats at the Kazan tournament showed a diametrically opposite result at the Blinov Cup in Omsk and his preparation for the start of the season. And quite another thing is when HC Sochi, a week before the first match of the championship, literally falls apart at a competition in St. Petersburg, losing bags of pucks from different opponents and demonstrating complete discord in the game.
The most surprising thing is that in early August the Leopards played good hockey at the local tournament. There was even a feeling that the southerners, who abandoned the indiscriminate bet on youth and replenished in the offseason with experienced players and good legionnaires, had full contact with coach Dmitry Kokorev and in the next season they are definitely ready to rise from the bottom of the table. Western Conference and at least compete seriously for the play-off.
Kokorev himself spoke about building a new team, about fast and offensive hockey that he was going to instill, and about his wards in public and on the sidelines, and the calm and reasonable disposition of the mentor was noted, who tried to find a common language with everything and everyone and abandoned the traditional methods of Russian training schools.
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All this is great and good, but only under the leadership of a liberal coach, as Kokorev proved to be, everything quickly got out of hand for Sochi. It all started at the end of the home tournament, when the Leopards lost a scoreless loss to Admiral 0-5. So this result seemed to be an accident, but at the end of the summer in St. Petersburg the southerners performed even worse. 1:7 from Severstal, 2:8 from Avtomobilist: Sochi was defeated far from the main favorites of the season. In between these two results was a seemingly dignified defeat for the experimental SKA team, however in that match the Leopards lost their long-term lead and missed the decisive goal in the dying minutes of regulation.
It turns out that the southern team on the eve of the season cannot see any game and character. But the head coach is everyone’s friend and he doesn’t yell at anyone! But this model of behavior for a hockey coach is appropriate in two cases. Or if the coach has unquestioned authority and great experience, like, for example, Zinetula Bilyaletdinov in Ak Bars. Or if he has a powerful all-star team at his disposal, in communication with which he cannot go too far, then the players themselves will do everything right. So, for example, it was with Mikhail Kravets last season at Avangard.
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Kokorev in Sochi does not meet these criteria, so his weakness is now hurting both the team and himself. It’s time for the coach to change the role of a listener in the locker room to that of a speaker, show character, if necessary, then tighten the screws a little, otherwise the “leopards”, who have a good and strong composition, will continue. playing incomprehensibly what and, as a result, this will inevitably lead to the fact that the tradition of changing managers at Sochi HC at the beginning of the regular season will be observed.
Dmitry Kokorev
Photo: Dmitry Golubovich, Championship
And another strange moment from Sochi’s performance at the St. Petersburg tournament, also related to team management. It’s no secret that a coach works successfully when he has a team of like-minded people at his disposal. Kokorev’s headquarters was successfully formed in the summer, but now Oleg Kupriyanov, the former sports director of the FHR and the same person with a suitcase of cash from Dave King’s legendary stories about Magnitogorsk in the mid-1990s. 2000, has come from somewhere in the world. team bench.
58-year-old Kupriyanov, who has spent half his life working in serious positions in the best clubs and in the institute of the Russian national teams, on the Sochi bench seems inappropriate, superfluous and imposed on Kokorev, who, perhaps, as a novice coach , he is absolutely shy in front of a hardened official with incomprehensible duties. Is Kupriyanov now, as in the old days in the national youth team, instilling patriotic pathos in the Sochi players and setting strict rules according to long-outdated and irrelevant methods?
If this is so, then Kokorev, who is already losing the team from his hands, has an additional problem. And if the coach, as the main person of the team, cannot figure it out, if he does not finally show the presence of an inner core, then Sochi will wait for another inglorious season, and Kokorev himself will return to oblivion as a coach.
