“They become scapegoats”: why three coaching resignations after five rounds of the RPL raise questions

The current season of the RPL is turning out to be rich in changes.

After the first five rounds, three teams changed their coaches at once: Khimki, Ural and Torpedo. 

There were more resignations at the start only in the 2013/14 season, when Guus Hiddink (Anji), Pavel Gusev (Ural), Slavoljub Muslin (Krasnodar) and Gadzhi Gadzhiev (Wings of the Soviets) were left without work.

However, Gadzhiev left Samara to help the club from Makhachkala, which was going through a difficult period of changing the development vector, having lost many stars.

Unexplained resignation of Yuran and personnel problems of Shalimov and Borodyuk

The current season in many ways stands apart also because all three castlings on the coaching bridge turned out to be optional and left questions.

First of all, this concerns Yuran.

The Luhansk native took over Khimki at the beginning of the year in an extremely difficult situation, just a few days before the resumption of the season, when Igor Cherevchenko unexpectedly left his post.

At the same time, the Moscow Region team was in last place in the standings, four points away from the zone of transitional meetings.

Sergei Nikolaevich managed to shake up the team and perform a miracle.

Under his leadership, he scored 18 points in the remaining 12 RPL matches and climbed to 13th place.

It was not possible to avoid participation in the joints, but there the Khimki team turned out to be stronger than SKA-Khabarovsk - 0:1, 3:0.

Successfully they started the new championship.

In the first round, the red-blacks completely managed to stop Zenit (1:1).

Pari NN (3:0) and Torpedo (3:1) were confidently beaten.

The only thing that stood out was the defeat from Rostov with a minimum score, despite the fact that the southerners scored the only goal thanks to a competent drawing of a standard position.

Yuran was fired after the fourth round, when Khimki were in seventh place, three points behind Spartak and CSKA, who shared the lead.

The club explained the extremely illogical decision in terms of the result rather vaguely.

Allegedly, there was an agreement with the specialist specifically on short-term cooperation.

Different versions of what happened surfaced in the media: from Yuran's unwillingness to let Ilya Sadygov, the son of the club's main investor Tufan Sadygov, on the field, to the proposal to hand over the game to Rostov in the spring.

The latter option itself was refuted and emphasized that if someone turned to him with such an idea, this person could “fly off his head”.

In the very first match, led by a new mentor Nikolai Pisarev, Khimki lost to Akhmat at home and dropped to ninth place.

If Yuran's departure is difficult to explain with reasonable arguments, then the dismissal of Shalimov from Ural and Borodyuk from Torpedo at first glance looks logical, since both teams started extremely unsuccessfully in the national championship.

Ekaterinburg residents did not score a single point after four rounds, when the management made a tough decision.

Muscovites after five were content with one.

Both teams are now in the direct relegation zone.

However, if you look at the state of affairs in more detail, the fault of specialists seems not so obvious.

Questions also arise to the management of the clubs, which did not complete the teams in the best way.

Avtozavodtsy, having won a ticket to the elite division, did not have the funds to radically change the roster and strengthen performers with extensive experience in the RPL.

Perhaps, only defenders Ilya Kutepov and Igor Smolnikov can be called such players.

But the first has a rich history of injuries in the liability.

Despite the fact that the athlete’s previous team, Spartak, was assured that he was completely healthy, he missed the first three matches due to another injury.

And the debut in the meeting with Orenburg turned into a removal at the beginning of the second half.

Otherwise, the black-and-whites were forced to take on young players who had either not played in the RPL before or had played a minimum number of matches: Hojimat Erkinov, Bogdan Reichman, Artyom Simonyan, Dzambolat Tsallagov, Maxim Turishchev.

Of the newcomers, Torpedo was immediately helped only by David Karaev, who moved from SKA-Khabarovsk, who made his way to the base and scored two points according to the “goal + pass” system.

At the same time, Borodyuk never got a productive striker at his disposal, if you do not take into account the 20-year-old Turishchev, and was forced to divide the playing time between him, Amur Kalmykov and 39-year-old Igor Lebedenko.

As a result, they did not score even once, and the team scored only three goals, one of which was Vanya Drkusic's own goal in the confrontation with Sochi.

Not the best way things are in defense.

Torpedo ranks last in terms of conceded goals, along with Pari NN and Lokomotiv (12 each).

It is not surprising that Borodyuk, after the very first games, emphasized that the leadership was thinking about strengthening and noted: his wards are not able to instantly adapt to the fundamentally different speeds of the elite division and think much faster on the field.

Shalimov found himself in a similar situation in Ural, who at the end of the season managed to avoid not only relegation to the FNL, but also getting into the joints with the Yekaterinburg team.

However, he did not receive any reinforcement either.

The club continued to adhere to the transfer policy of staffing the team for little money with players who have proven themselves in the FNL or FNL-2.

So, Leo Goglichidze and Mingiyan Beveev were bought out from Krasnodar and Yenisei, respectively.

Emmerson moved from SKA-Khabarovsk as a free agent.

The signing of Alexei Kashtanov from Rodina, who had not even played a single match in the FNL, turned out to be indicative.

Nevertheless, Shalimov was forced to rely on him as the main attacker.

On top of all the troubles in the match of the starting round with CSKA, the key performers of Yekaterinburg in the center of the field, Oleg Shatov and Vyacheslav Podberezkin, were injured.

A weak start was largely associated with a difficult calendar.

In the first four rounds, Ural, in addition to the army team, played with Orenburg, Krasnodar and Spartak.

And even in confrontations with teams superior in class, Shalimov's wards looked worthy.

For example, the southerners scored all three of their goals from standard positions, one of which was from a controversial penalty.

The outsider did not realize a number of chances and scored only once with an expected goals indicator (xG) of 1.42.

And in the only game with an equal opponent - Orenburg - the bumblebees were ruined by the optional removal of Goglichidze in the first half.

Left in the minority, they conceded three times and suffered a major defeat.

In matches with Fakel and Pari NN, the former mentor could well have corrected the situation, but he was not given a chance.

“Each of the coaches, signing a contract, must be ready for dismissal”

To understand how fair the first coaching resignations in the current RPL season became and what they testify to, RT turned to experienced specialists Gadzhi Gadzhiev and Boris Ignatiev, who themselves have found themselves in this situation more than once.

According to Hajiyev, there is nothing surprising in what is happening.

He believes that recently there has been more and more discussion of the transfer of players and the budgets of clubs, but not the training process itself.

“From this series of statements by Leonid Fedun that only 10% of the coach's merit is in the success of the team.

But such a formulation of the question is useless: it has brought Russian football to the low point where we are at the moment.

You need to understand that the basis is always the training process.

If the players do not prepare correctly, they will not get anywhere, ”the specialist explained.

Speaking about the departure of Shalimov and Borodyuk from Ural and Torpedo, respectively, he emphasized that one of the components of success is competent work in the transfer market and decent funding.

“Both clubs had questions about this part.

It is clear that in the end the result is determined by the work of mentors.

For some reason, they always become scapegoats.

On the other hand, when teams don't score, it's hard to say that it's not their fault," Hajiyev added.

He called Yuran’s resignation from Khimki completely inexplicable and, as a similar example, recalled the termination of Lokomotiv’s contract with Yuri Semin in 2020, when the railway workers took second place in the RPL standings.

“Back then, no one understood anything.

Unfortunately, specialists should always be ready for illogical resignations, even in cases where their wards give results and show good football, ”complained Gadzhiev.

Ignatiev expressed a similar point of view.

According to him, five rounds is too short a time to draw serious conclusions and fire coaches.

At the same time, he does not believe that in the case of Shalimov and Borodyuk, one should talk about the loss of contact with the wards.

“Mostly we are talking about general omissions when, among other things, the coach does not have players who are able to provide the game that he wants to see.

I can’t say that they were kicked out for nothing, but both Ural and Torpedo really didn’t strengthen themselves in the best way before the start of the season.

Plus, in clubs, when dismissing a specialist, they must clearly understand who will take his place.

Ural immediately invited Viktor Goncharenko.

Each of the coaches, signing a contract, must be ready to be fired, but I don’t understand why Borodyuk was removed.

After all, it was only in the spring that he did a great job by returning the car factory workers to the RPL.

I think he should have been given more time, and not broken the contract after five rounds.

This is not entirely fair, ”said the former mentor of the Russian national team.

Khimki, the specialist believes, created problems for themselves by terminating the contract with Yuran for unknown reasons, since now his colleagues will be afraid to go to the Moscow region so as not to find themselves in a similar situation.