Losses of the year
One of the bitterest losses by Russian players in the outgoing year was the failure of the Russian ice hockey team of Vyacheslav Bykov at the World Championship. The team hardly made it to the play-offs, managed to beat its principal opponents, the Canadians, but then Bykov’s team lost to the Finnish national team, only to lose third position later, ending up with no medals. Together with the crushing defeat by the Canadians at the Olympic Games in Vancouver, the failures show that the system of training and equipping the national team needs changing. Judging by media reports, the Bykov-Zakharkin duo was unprepared. And the supervisors too were not prepared to admit their mistakes. Moreover, the emotional Zakharkin got himself into newspaper arguments with veterans and dared make offensive outbursts against his elders, which doesn't lend popularity to heads of the national team. The Russian Ice Hockey Federation urged Bykov and Zakharkin to resign. Zinetula Bilyaletdinov became the new leader of the national team. He is to train the team for the main start of the quadrennium of the Olympic Games in Sochi. Yet the fate of coaches is changeable and there would probably be no one to predict who will end up supervising the Russian national team right at the start of the Winter Olympic Games 2014.
Debut of the year
The Russian national team made its debut at the Rugby World Cup in 2011. Specialists and journalists gave different ratings to the first experience of the Russian national team. Some noted that Russian rugby players failed to make a serious battle even with the weakest team of the group, the US team. Others paid more attention to the record the national team had set. The Russian team managed to make 8 attempts to score in 4 games, which is a record for debutants of the World Cup. But the achievement should not be overestimated. Three out of eight attempts at the opponents’ end were made in the second half of the last match, when the Russian team was already losing to Australia. But the team failed to score a try in the game vs. the US team.
Pessimists and optimists had different evaluations of the game and the further prospects of the Russian national rugby team. They believe that the Russians would not only attend the World Cup in England but also win a match or more. Others are confident that the level of rugby in Russia is still too low for top teams and “second-class teams”.
