The World Championship is taking place in Finland these days, without the Russian team. They say it won’t be in the 2023 World Cup either. In his absence, fans follow the Kazakhstan team, he will go to the next tournament. In the last match of the group stage, the Kazakhs managed to advance to the lower league from being relegated. However, it is not worth being proud of such a result in their homeland.

The national team of Kazakhstan for a long time swayed between the highest and first leagues. And now, for two years in a row, he has been holding a place among the elite. It is true that at the last World Cup, which is currently happening, he was a foreigner and fought for the penultimate place in the group, which allowed him to maintain his residence permit in the future. The Kazakhs, who won two matches in Latvia a year ago, managed only one match this time. The first six meetings were lost and only on the penultimate day of the group stage Italy was defeated (6:3), which recently entered the world championship of the best teams.

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According to the main statistics, the team of Yuri Mikhailis is not the worst in Finland. Finally, it ranks 16th only in terms of minority (a dreadful 52%) and turnout (2595). The difference between goals scored in 7 games and goals conceded is 19-31. The Kazakhs lost four of their six matches by one goal, which is a consolation for some. The reason it wasn’t the best game was because the team was without a goalkeeper for the tournament. Finn Yoni Ortio, who received Kazakhstan sports citizenship, refused to participate in the World Cup. Nikita Boyarkin, who gave a great performance in 2021, could not go due to injury. The Swedish Henrik Karlsson had long forgotten that he had another passport. Mikhailis had to bet on Andrei Shutov (one game per season in the KHL).

However, it is worth considering that the current World Cup should have a different composition of participants. Russia and Belarus were replaced by France and Austria, which were not initially among the elite teams. And it is clear that Russia will be one of the favorites of Group A and will not fight for survival like the French. But they also surpassed the Cossacks. From the first matches in Helsinki, it was clear that Mikhailis’ team had big problems with “physics”, this was also noticed in the friendly matches against Latvia, which lost by a small margin. During the tournament, Cossacks added, but this was not enough for victories – the Germans, Canadians, Swiss and Slovaks were stronger. At the same time, it cannot be said that the composition of Kazakhstan is weak. Akolzin, Mikhailis, Panyukov, Volk, Starchenko, who played important roles in the KHL, went on the offensive. Defense also consists entirely of players playing in the playoffs. Svedberg and Dietz. However, no one, except Orekhov (who learned about his transfer from Barys to Metallurg immediately after the match with Italy) could not prove himself 100%. The 22-year-old defender became the team’s top scorer with 7 (3+4) points. He received the same amount of points for the entire season of the KHL. Dietz, as always, “bred” a lot. Collecting in the NHL, Mikhailis scored two goals (6 points). Akolzin has the most penalty minutes and 3 points for the team (11). Panyukov did not play much, Volk made a lot of mistakes.

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“The level of the championship is even higher than the Olympics, so I’m saying that we need to play in the elite league for three, five, seven years to set our goal of making it to the playoffs. Look at the end… When did we play in the elite twice? 17-18 years ago? You really have to look at things.”– summed up the tournament captain Roman Starchenko.

The Kazakhstan national team really wasn’t performing as badly as it did five or six years ago. However, it did not make any progress, even regressed. Take the same Italians in a match, where they managed to get tickets to the next championship. According to their names, their composition is much weaker: most of the players are from the Austrian league, there is not a single person from a strong European championship. Passing Kazakhstan, France also has a few tough players. Only Alexander Texier from Columbus stands out, the rest are from the middle leagues of Europe. The Kazakh team consisted of players from the KHL, the strongest league in Europe.

In Kazakhstan, they are trying to solve hockey problems with the main club of the national team in the KHL and with the help of naturalization. But none of the methods work properly. The theme of the base club did not bring results even to the Russian team, whose casting was much higher. Naturalization failed in both Belarus and Kazakhstan. Foreigners are not very keen on giving the best of everything for their country’s national team, and young people do not grow up next to them. The latter can only happen when there is high competition. Progress should not take too long, given that in the KHL more and more Kazakh players are finding jobs in clubs of different strengths. The main thing is to understand this in the federation. Leaving the parent club, combining the positions of a coach (Mikhailis was never convinced as head coach of the national team), and stopping issuing passports to foreigners are the first steps to take now.

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