Vatutin, president of CSKA, on Raikovitch’s resignation: “There were long discussions, but in the end we came to a forced but logical decision”

President of the basketball club CSKA Andrei Vatutin in an interview with he said that the decision to terminate the contract with the head coach Emil Rajkovic It was forced, but logical.

CSKA announced Rajkovic’s resignation from the post of head coach of the team on Monday. The team will be led until the end of the season by Greek specialist Andreas Pistiolis, who previously worked as an assistant to former CSKA head coach Dimitris Itoudis.

— There are things that will remain within the team and the club. Someone will surely judge our decision as inappropriate and emotional. It’s their right. But in parting with Emil, there are no emotions as a determining factor. There were long internal discussions, following which we reached a decision, unfortunately forced, but logical.

In my opinion, the change of coach sends a clear signal that we prefer to take risks rather than accept the current situation. In the second half of the regular season, the team’s results only got worse and we constantly analyzed the situation, trying to correct the situation using external and internal reserves. The coaching staff had been looking for a newcomer to strengthen them for a long time, then the story of Will Barton, the injury of Casper Ware and a forced change in the direction of the search occurred when the coach chose a ” small” defender on an athletic “wing”. We hoped the break between tours and the trip to Turkey would help make the necessary adjustments. In fact, no improvement occurred and at the second stage the team played, perhaps, only two good matches – at home with Parma and, depending on the final result and desire, with Lokomotiv at the exterior. As a result, we only won three out of ten matches with the top six teams and finished last, along with Yenisey.

“Maybe we should have taken this step sooner?

— A coaching change at this stage of the season is a rarity, a step outside the realm of shock therapy. So they were patient and hoped for change. Additionally, the mentioned matches with Parma and Loko gave optimism. But in general, it became very difficult to watch what was happening, it was painful to see how record after record was set against us, how only three opposing players scored 77 points in a match, how Dimitrievich tore the team apart twice almost alone. -by hand.

We talked a lot and constantly – both with the team and with Emil, we saw changes, but overall nothing worked. In the second part of the season, something broke in his system, the team-coach interaction left a lot to be desired and ultimately we hit a dead end. The last detailed conversation took place before the match in Kazan. And after the match we exchanged opinions with Emil and came to the conclusion that a change of coach could help the team,” Vatutin said in an interview with .

CSKA took third place in the VTB United League regular season. In the quarter-finals of the playoffs, the “red-blues” will play with the “Yenisey” from Krasnoyarsk.

Watch live broadcasts of VTB United League matches on TV channels of the Match holding company, as well as on the websites matchtv.ru and sportbox.ru.