Khabarovsk Guardian “Cupid” Igor Bobkov In an interview with , said that the Magnitogorsk striker “Metallurgy” Nikita Grebenkin tried to put pressure on him during the first round of the last Gagarin Cup.
Last season, the Khabarovsk club reached the KHL playoffs, but lost to Metallurg (2-4 in the series) in the first round. “Metallurg” defeated Yaroslavl “Lokomotiv” with a score of 4:0 in the final series of the Gagarin Cup.
— You could have seen the series with Magnitogorsk. When did you miss this opportunity?
— This is probably the fifth game in the series where I’ve been replaced. I missed a few unimportant goals there. It happens in hockey, you don’t always appreciate it. And in the sixth game, we played tied, until a goal was scored. We conceded at the end and tied it at 6 on 5, but in overtime, everything was decided by Nikita Grebenkin’s shot. He couldn’t score the whole series, but here he did it at the most important moment.
— Was Grebenkin trolling you, getting under your skin?
– Yes, of course. Nikita comes and says different things that I can’t repeat while listening to the recorder. In a word, he promises in a special way that he will score now. And during the season he came regularly. And in the playoffs, I see that in the first two games he made tackles. Then he calmed down, because he saw that he could not get under my skin. But the last throw was behind him.
— Is this kind of trash talk a North American style?
— To be honest, in America it is much harder. We even got to the point of personal insults. They didn’t touch me, but I heard what the guys were saying to the other goalkeeper. “I wouldn’t be able to stand it if I were him,” Bobkov told .
In 44 matches of the Fonbet KHL Championship, Bobkov won 19 victories with a reliability coefficient of 2.20 and 93% of reflected shots. In the first round of the Gagarin Cup against Metallurg Magnitogorsk, he lost four matches out of six.
Bobkov has been defending the colours of “Amur” since 2023; previously, the hockey player played for “Admiral”, “Avangard”, “Avtomobilist” and “Ak Bars”.
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