Krylya Sovetov Samara last season flew out of the Russian Premier League (RPL), but they are already striving back with might and main.
Igor Osinkin's wards topped the National Football League (FNL) standings after 18 rounds.
Striker Ivan Sergeev made the most significant contribution to the intermediate success of the team - in 15 matches for the Samara club, he has already scored 17 goals and issued three hat-tricks.
So far, the leadership of Krylia in the first division of the Russian championship is rather shaky.
They earned 39 points, Nizhny Novgorod managed to score the same amount.
But at the same time, the Samarans have more impressive statistics of goals scored and conceded.
They have 40 goals on their account, and they conceded only 11 times.
According to both indicators, "Wings" are the best in the FNL.
The Moscow Torpedo and Orenburg are located not far from the elevation zone.
They are only two points behind the leaders.
It is quite possible that the Avtozavodtsy would have been positioned even higher, if at the beginning of the season Sergeev had not left them for Wings of the Soviets, who is now unconditionally leading in the scorer race.
Russian forward Ivan Sergeev will fly to Samara tonight.
Tomorrow Krylia Sovetov will sign a contract with the player and he will join the team.
Ivan's previous club was Moscow Torpedo, in which he played 64 matches and scored 35 goals.
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- PFC Krylya Sovetov (@fckssamara) August 13, 2020
The 25-year-old striker signed with the Volzhany in mid-August after three games with Torpedo this season and helped the new team rise from the middle of the standings to first place in two and a half months.
Already in the debut match, Sergeev gave an effective pass, which helped to defeat Seagull with a score of 3: 0, and soon he began to score regularly.
In the game with Dynamo Bryansk, he scored his first hat-trick, and soon repeated this achievement in meetings with Tekstilshchik and Shinnik.
In October, Sergeev scored in every FNL match in which he took part.
His streak has lasted six games, in which he scored 11 goals.
In total, he has 17 goals in his last 12 matches.
At the same time, Sergeev scores most of the goals from the game, and differed from the penalty spot only in two cases.
After his transition, Wings of the Soviets lost points only on four occasions, having been defeated twice and drawn twice.
Also, with the participation of Sergeev, the Samara team became the only team from the first division that was able to overcome the group stage of the Russian Cup and reach the 1/8 finals.
The striker himself did not score at this stage, but helped his partners to do so in the victorious matches with Stavropol Dynamo and Volgograd Rotor.
In the race of scorers between Sergeev and other snipers, there is a whole abyss.
His closest pursuer is Dmitry Vorobyov from Volgar, who has eight goals.
If the striker continues in this vein, he will most likely become the FNL's top scorer for the second time in a row.
Last season, he already shared the laurels of the most productive player with his Torpedo partner Alexander Rudenko.
They both scored 14 goals.
True, the performance of both then did not help the Muscovites return to the RPL.
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the season ended ahead of schedule, and Torpedo remained in fourth place, and there were no play-offs with the teams of the elite division.
In the summer, Sergeev played three more matches with Torpedo, after which he moved to a team with which he would have more chances to go for promotion.
Sergeyev began his career in football in his native Cherepovets, where he played at the amateur level for Severstal and Cherepovets.
Once the coach helped him get to see Strogino, which played in the second division, and from that moment the striker began his professional career.
He represented Muscovites for four years, with a break for a short lease in the Latvian "Riga".
In 2017, Sergeev made his debut in the FNL for Tambov, but it did not work out there, and the next season he went on loan again, now to Torpedo, which was then playing in the Professional Football League (PFL).
In this club, he has already opened up for real and helped the "avtozavodtsy" immediately go up for promotion.
In total, as part of the Muscovites, Sergeev scored 35 goals in 64 matches, until he moved to Wings of the Soviets.
On November 1, he will have to meet with the former team already in the framework of the FNL championship.
It is worth noting that the scoring record for the first division of the Russian football championship is 38 goals.
This is how much Andrey Fedkov scored in 2004 for Terek Grozny.
To surpass this achievement, Sergeev needs to hit the opponents' goal 22 more times in the remaining 24 meetings of the season.