Source: www.rucriminal.info
A terrible calendar, low entertainment, financial troubles of clubs... Journalist Alexey Matveev discussed all these points especially for the VChK-OGPU telegram channel and Rucriminal.info with the hockey legend, two-time Olympic champion Boris Mayorov.
KHL. END OF THE GAME?
- Boris Alexandrovich, you are a well-known critic of the Kontinental Hockey League. What are the league's main flaws?
- I criticized the creation itself, its structural divisions from the very beginning. After all, when organizing the KHL, they blindly took the overseas National Hockey League (NHL) as a model. Absolutely without taking into account the social problems of Russia, the financial situation of clubs, the history of domestic hockey. This is where new-fangled, and, by and large, unnecessary conferences, divisions, and a simply crazy calendar of matches appeared.
In general, it is a grave mistake to copy someone or something. Especially without taking into account the specifics of Russia. It was necessary to look for a correspondence, for example, between the number of matches and the capabilities of the clubs themselves. In order not to harm the educational and training process. 68 games in the regular season for each team! Some kind of stupidity. We are ruining our hockey in favor of the ambitions of a handful of, to put it mildly, stupid people.
HOCKEY IS A SPECTACULAR. BUT HE IS NOT
- Well, the more matches, the more fans in the stands. Is not it? And the clubs will make money, they won’t hang around sponsors with their hand always outstretched - give them money...
- That's exactly what the league organizers thought and still think: we play more often, more money. No! I talked with the president of the Yaroslavl Lokomotiv, which seemed to be prosperous in many respects. He claims that due to fans attending matches at the Yaroslavl Ice Palace, the club recoups a maximum of 25 percent of the budget. That is, only a quarter. St. Petersburg has always stood out against this background; they have twelve thousand fans at every home match. But they are the only ones, the rest, it turns out, are in an unenviable position.
At the same time, the calendar is completely wild: hockey matches every other day with travel. After all, a number of specialists, my supporters, accurately noticed: we stopped training. It is not normal! And skill grows, believe me, as a former hockey player, coach, and official, precisely in the process of training, and not only and not so much during matches. Only when you repeatedly repeat the same exercise in class, albeit monotonously, do the skills necessary for hockey appear.
- And what is the way out? Reduce, for example, the number of teams? Who, excuse me, needs inveterate outsiders who languish at the bottom of the table from year to year? Let's say, the Moscow region "Vityaz", or the Chinese "Kunlun". The latter are generally a political project of two presidents; there is no sports component here...
- It’s not the teams that need to be removed, but the number of matches that need to be reduced. The most reasonable solution. And with such a rigid, even inhuman calendar, the “funeral” of domestic hockey may take place very soon. We simply cannot train quality craftsmen.
- Maybe fans of the game are just impressed by this rhythm of the championship, when the matches are without build-up, their favorites are constantly in action, in sight?
- They are unlikely to be delighted with this. Especially the other half of the family - girlfriends, wives, children, including. Imagine, your favorite team, according to the calendar, plays five or six home matches in a row. And there are fans who go to away games of their favorites. What family budget can handle this? What, do millionaires go to hockey? Ordinary people, at best, with average income, go there.
As I say, the league was organized by short-sighted gentlemen, they did not take into account social conditions at all, did not calculate basic things. What did you want to see? The Continental Hockey League was made by visiting gentlemen from the NHL, plus those who once played there for us - Larionov, Fetisov, their associates and associates. So we got, I think, a “raw product”...
Interviewed by Alexey Matveev
Source: www.rucriminal.info
