It turned out to be brilliant, but not effective.

In Russian club football, from love to hate and back, it may not be one step, but certainly three or four matches. After Spartak’s sensational start to the season, some hot minds were ready to crown the red and whites and Guillermo Abascal. Then came a black stripe outside the club colours. And only the lazy did not try to perform the same Abaskal and the whole “Spartak”, talking about a natural failure.

Questions about expectations

Now fans’ emotional swings are gradually taking the opposite position. After all, Spartak won their third match in a row. After Sochi (1:0) in the championship and Paris NN (3:0) in the Russian Cup, Abascal’s team prevailed over Dynamo. What is noteworthy is not so much the third consecutive victory, but the fact that Spartak did not concede a single goal. At the end of the match, all the players on the team, all the experts of various calibers and Abascal himself spoke about it:

A very important victory. We understood that it would be difficult because Dynamo are a strong opponent. This is the third consecutive victory in a short period. And we didn’t miss it again. This is very important after an unsuccessful period. Our next match will be against Krylia Sovetov. And this is one of the leaders of the league. It will be a great match.

The fans also expected a bright and productive match from the meeting with Dynamo. This was already the third match between these rivals in 2023. And the first two were crazy. In April the match ended with the score 3:3. And already this season, a month ago, in the Russian Cup, Spartak defeated Dynamo with a score of 4:1. All expectations were revived by the open style professed by both teams, who are not very proud of their defensive reliability, but are capable of scoring a lot.

Already the start of the match showed that the fans could expect many goals. Spartak carried out a perfect counterattack. Promes disperses it, passes it down the right wing to Sobolev, who makes a stunning pass in the center for Bongonda, who goes one-on-one and deals with the goalkeeper. This happened already in the seventh minute. Hardly anyone expected that Theo’s goal would be the only one of the match.

It should be noted that Bongonda himself, after an impressive start to the season, has wilted a bit lately, which corresponds to the team’s general decline in form. He hadn’t scored before this match since August 11th. At the same time, Theo remains Spartak’s top scorer RPL. He has four goals to his name and scored another in the Russian Cup. For comparison, Khlusevich, Sobolev and Promes have two goals each in the league.

Collection of nonsense

In the episode with Bongonda’s goal, several shortcomings of the Dinamo players can be noted. Let’s start with the fact that Smolov lost the ball in someone else’s penalty area. In itself, this is nothing special – that’s how many attackers’ attacks end. But after the defeat, he had the chance to immediately interrupt Spartak’s nascent counterattack with a small foul. He thought it didn’t make sense. Already in the process of accelerating the attack, it became obvious that Dynamo did not have time to position itself correctly, retreating. This is already a guaranteed reason to stop the breakthrough with a minor foul. But instead there is an honorary accompaniment of the running Promes, and it was still possible to slow him down, and when he had already passed to Sobolev, the attack could not be stopped.

Close Theo had the opportunity. During the retreat, Balbuena for some reason began to move to Sobolev’s flank, where several players were already located. In doing so, he exposed the central axis. Moreover, in the replays you can see how Chavez seems to indicate this, but Balbuena simply does not see Luis’s gesture, and the Mexican rushes through Bongonda himself. He discovered himself late. When Chavez reached Bongonda, he shot on goal from outside the area from a comfortable position. And it seems that none of the microepisodes in Dynamo’s actions can be called a big mistake or some kind of failure. There are many such fragments in every game. But their combination can ultimately lead to similar goals and results. Talking about the importance of small things.

I played it safe

Also noteworthy is Dinamo’s initially passive position. Although Lichka separately emphasized after the match that before the match he had warned the team about the danger of rapid Spartak counterattacks. It’s ironic that we ran into exactly this in the seventh minute. Obviously, such an early goal breaks all plans, whatever they may be. Dynamo, who initially chose a style of play that was initially unusual for her (like Spartak and Zenit at the same time), spent a long time trying to come to her senses.

Separately, we can note the absence of Skopintsev in the starting lineup. Apparently Lichka was afraid of the fast Bongonda and thought that Marichal could deal with him better. But this limited the attacking potential of Dinamo’s flank. Maybe with Skopintsev Bongonda and Denisov should have thought more about defense, and Theo would have had problems working from the back. It turned out that Marichal did not properly secure the flank, and Dynamo deprived themselves of the opportunity to test the opponent in an important area.

In the second half, Skopintsev, one of the most active in the match, came out. But by then Bongonda had already left and the teams’ approach to the match was different, based on the score and tasks for the rest of the half. So there is no point in speculating directly here. Lichka, in principle, tried to somehow confuse his opponent by changing his lineup, which made his substitutions clearly based on position.

Almost a draw

After the break, Dynamo looked preferable to Spartak, who succumbed to the temptation to prioritize maintaining the winning score. This dictated the entry of Zinkovsky instead of Bongonda in a deeper position, the entry of Zobnin instead of Moses and the appearance of Umyarov and Chernov simply refreshed the positions in the support zone and in the center of defense. Licka did his best to make the attack work, with which he openly expressed dissatisfaction at the end of the game, blaming the defeat on his inability to score when given good opportunities.

As a result, Dynamo shot 20 times at Spartak’s goal, against 15 attempts by the “red and whites”. In terms of accurate shots, there is equality: 6 shots on goal. And whoever says that the game can be considered equal is probably right. Even at half-time the opponents could have been tied if the ball after Chavez’s long-range shot had ended up in the goal and not on the crossbar.

In the second half both teams had opportunities to score. One of the heroes of the match was Maksimenko, who during the break replaced Selikhov in the Spartak goal, who felt pain in his back. The substitute entered the game brilliantly, saving several difficult shots, some of which were doubles. On the other hand, towards the end of the match, Dynamo openly took risks and allowed Spartak to have scoring chances on the counterattack. Here the execution was already disappointing Abascal’s team, especially Promes.

In any case, the derby turned out to be brilliant. And even if there were not many goals, the dynamics of the match, the tension and the number of chances corresponded to the examples of the most spectacular fights.