Update Post: November 30, 2023 4:40 pm
The current Gagarin Cup champion, CSKA, continues to face serious difficulties at the start of this season. Some may say it’s too early to draw preliminary conclusions, because teams haven’t played even a quarter of their regular-season games yet. This would have been the case if it were not for where the team was before the next meeting with Lokomotiv.
The third or fourth position in the conference could still be explained by the “warm-up” nature of the first games of the Club, which probably should have no problems reaching the playoffs. But tenth place and six defeats in nine games is still something extraordinary for the champion. And the failure in Togliatti could not have caused anything but confusion. That is why the red-and-blue fans were looking forward to the away game in Yaroslavl.
Lada beat CSKA for the first time in 14 years. The champion was terrible.
The military team spent the first minutes on the ice at Arena 2000 as if they were tired of losing. The visitors created a couple of good chances near Daniil Isaev’s goal and opened the scoring in the third minute. Pavel Karnaukhov came out from behind the goal and beat the goalkeeper.
APS CSKA
This is where the Muscovites were able to build on their success, but then the initiative passed to the railway workers. Now they have already densely settled at the gate of Ivan Fedotov. And they managed to restore equality on the scoreboard. Kayumov caught the puck on a throw-in and managed to send it into the net on the second attempt.
After this, an alarming moment came for the army team. Vitaly Abramov went to serve a two-minute penalty. And considering that CSKA is not the most outstanding team in the minority, Sergei Fedorov’s team could very quickly go from being the leading team in the match to being the team that recovers. In the end, the guests survived, although not without difficulties. In the future, teams could change the numbers on the scoreboard more than once. But Lokomotiv and CSKA went into the first break tied.
APS CSKA
The second half was less rich in dangerous moments than the first twenty minutes. But viewers still saw a goal scored in this segment. To the delight of the nearly full and usually noisy army guest section, she flew towards Isaev’s door. CSKA, with equal forces, pressed the Yaroslavl team in its zone, and this pressure brought success. Maxim Mamin found his namesake Sorkin with a pass, and one of the main heroes of the derby with Spartak overtook the guests.
In the third period, as expected, Lokomotiv became more active and began to stay more and more in the army zone. But after the shots of the Yaroslavl attackers, the puck did not reach the goal of the Muscovites or no longer posed any threat. At the same time, the red and blue were constantly threatening to counterattack, so rushing into the attack was extremely dangerous.
The moment of the decisive assault came less than a minute before the siren sounded. The military team was unable to get the puck out of their zone and this almost led to Kayumov’s second goal of the game. Ivan Fedotov managed to avoid the threat. After that, Lokomotiv gained a foothold in the opposing zone and released the sixth outfield player. But CSKA survived and achieved its fourth victory of the season, breaking the Yaroslavl team’s four-game winning streak.