Total superiority in Moscow and referee scandal in Grozny: how CSKA and Spartak started in the RPL with new coaches

30 shots on goal and experiments in defense

The first starting match in the Russian Football Championship under the leadership of the new head coach was played by CSKA, and it was initially quite alarming for the army team.

During the pre-season, the wards of Vladimir Fedotov looked damp at times and lost in three out of four meetings with a total goal difference of 2:8.

However, their transformation in the first round of the RPL once again confirmed that one should not draw serious conclusions based on control games.

A rather experimental line-up for the home confrontation with Ural immediately caught my eye.

If the appearance of Igor Diveev and Kirill Nababkin in the defense trio suggested itself, then the presence of Baktiyor Zainutdinov in the place of the left central defender was unexpected.

After moving to CSKA, the universal football player managed to light up in four positions in the middle line, as well as in the role of a left lateral, but he had not tried himself in this capacity before.

And this spoke both of the presence of serious problems with personnel, and of Fedotov's desire to have more options in attack.

As a result, the Kazakhstani not only regularly performed his direct duties, but also supported the attacks of the hosts, and sometimes even ended up near the border of the guests' penalty area.

In contrast to him, Nababkin acted in a more defensive style and quite rarely switched to someone else's half.

In general, Fedotov did not deviate from both his favorite formation and corporate identity.

He used various variations of the 3-4-3 scheme from the time he worked at Orenburg, and did not change anything at CSKA either.

It was also about betting on short passes and the balance between possession and quick counterattacks.

The army team, although they tried to combine on someone else's third of the field, did it all at a fast pace and did not try to carry out protracted positional attacks.

On the contrary, they focused on transitional phases, and tried to accompany almost every approach to the opponent's penalty area with a kick.

As a result, only in the first half they shot 21 times on goal and ruined several right moments: Konstantin Kuchaev missed an empty corner from a few meters, Milan Gayich failed to convert a cross from the left flank into a goal,

and Jorge Carrascal dug into the penalty area and fired at the defender.

By and large, the Colombian was the most active and a total of seven times per half tried to hit the gate.

And although the implementation left much to be desired, the performance of CSKA looked more than encouraging, and the picture of the game left no doubt about the final success of the hosts.

And so it happened.

First, Ivan Oblyakov hit the far corner of the Ural goal, and in the second half Carrascal was rewarded for his activity.

The Colombian forced Ilya Pomazun to throw himself on the lawn in the penalty area, and then converted the penalty himself.

And one on one with the goalkeeper, he was brought out by Fedor Chalov, who played at the interception.

However, not only this was the merit of the RPL top scorer of the 2018/19 season.

Having returned from Basel, Chalov appeared at the start and left an extremely pleasant impression.

Even if he himself never hit the target, but he acted superbly in accompaniment and chalked up four key passes (transmissions that led to the creation of dangerous episodes).

According to this indicator, only the same Carrascal and Jesus Medina can compare with him, and more often only Oblyakov sharpened the game.

I was also struck by how rationally the Muscovites began to act after they took the lead with a score of 2:0.

Fedotov's wards retreated to their half, abandoned possession (33 - 67%) and relied on counterattacks.

And she was justified.

Yekaterinburgers failed to create anything bright at the gates of Igor Akinfeev, while Muscovites calmly kept the winning result.

Moreover, even during this segment, they outperformed their opponents in the number of shots (5:4) and, in general, were closer to a goal.

Thus, CSKA confidently started the season under the guidance of a new head coach, which was further confirmed by advanced statistics.

In the match with Ural, the Muscovites scored 3.49 of the expected goals (xG), which they never managed to achieve in the last championship, when the team was led by Alexei Berezutsky.

At that time, they only crossed the three xG mark three times, and they came closest to the level shown in March, when they defeated Rubin.

Then the red-blues scored six times, although they created significantly fewer scoring chances (3.45).

Moses' masterpiece and the controversial decisions of Bezborodov

Unlike CSKA, Spartak had already played a match for the Russian Super Cup, which made it possible to compare and evaluate the adjustments made by Guillermo Abascal.

This time, the Spaniard decided not to wait for the second half, but to give preference to the 4-3-3 scheme on the move, as a result of which the changes in the composition were logical.

Alexander Sobolev and Mikhail Ignatov were on the bench, and Shamar Nicholson and Anton Zinkovsky came out from the first minutes.

The ex-winger of Krylia Sovetov again became one of the team's main options in attack, and in the first half he touched the ball as many times as his partner Quincy Promes - another confirmation of his demand.

True, the Russian acted closer to someone else's penalty area, while the Dutchman continued to try on the role of the local Lionel Messi and be responsible for the development of attacks at all stages.

However, Spartak did not go well with this.

Perhaps the reason for this was the intense heat in Grozny and the hard pressure of the hosts, but in the first half of the meeting the guests had difficulty creating scoring chances.

The most obvious of them was missed by Nicholson, who failed to process the penetrating pass of Daniil Denisov.

The Red-Whites obviously lacked pace and thought, and the colossal territorial advantage (61-39%) did not translate into dangerous attacks.

Basically, the guests controlled the ball in their own half of the field, and when moving to someone else's, they fell into long-distance casting.

As for the defense, here everything looked even more depressing.

Andrei Talalaev did not reinvent the wheel and adopted the experience of Zenit, focusing on the right flank of Spartak's defense.

Most of the attacks went through the zone of Daniil Khlusevich, where Lechi Sadulaev and Miroslav Bogosavats reigned.

Nail Umyarov tried to help out his partner, but his displacement from the support zone was not always timely, and Denisov, who failed the game with Zenit, again extremely reluctantly helped his teammates.

It was he who, in stoppage time for the first half, missed Artyom Timofeev when he took a corner and allowed him to open an account.

But the main anti-hero of the starting game segment as part of the Muscovites was Maciej Rybus, who earned two yellow cards in a few seconds.

First, he stopped the opponent's fast attack in violation of the rules, and then threw the ball back.

Chief referee Vladislav Bezborodov reacted to this and left the guests in the minority.

It is all the more surprising that ten of Spartak looked prettier.

And although the red-whites still acted primitively and relied mainly on sheds, they still managed to restore parity.

This was facilitated by the successful replacement of Abaskal.

With the appearance of Sobolev and Christopher Martins, the pressure on the defense of the hosts increased, and the key was the entry into the field of Victor Moses.

At first, the Nigerian almost scored after a fantastic solo pass, and in the 83rd minute he created a real masterpiece.

The ex-Chelsea footballer handled the ball with his chest outside the penalty area and hammered it into the net with a volley.

The end of the meeting was remembered not only by Mozes's goal and the unrealized moments of Hamid Agalarov, who made his debut in Akhmat, but also by a number of controversial decisions by Bezborodov.

First, he did not put a 11-meter shot after the ball hit the hand of the hosts' football player, then he did not react to Sobolev's fall in the fight against the defender, and then he delivered an extremely ambiguous verdict in the episode with Giorgi Shelia.

A few minutes before the end of regular time, the goalkeeper collided in the air with the Spartak attacker, and after landing he waved his foot in his direction and hit his shin with spikes.

The chief referee went to watch the video replay for a penalty kick and a red card, but punished the goalkeeper with only a mustard plaster.

And this is already more than ambiguous, because the arbitrator does not have the right to present a yellow card based on the results of the video review, if it was carried out on the subject of a red one.

It can be assumed that Bezborodov did not notice the violation of the rules by Shelia, and issued a warning to him for his behavior.

One way or another, Spartak has already expressed its intention to apply to the expert-judging commission of the RFU on this episode.