SKA Head Coach Romain Rotenberg told that the club’s young hockey players, Ivan Demidov and Timur Kol, regularly get a lot of playing time because they beat the competition against more experienced athletes.
On Thursday, SKA will play its first home game of the season against Traktor Chelyabinsk. The match will take place in St. Petersburg and will start at 19:30 Moscow time.
— Three youngsters will play in SKA’s fourth five in the match against Traktor: forwards Ivan Demidov (18 years old), Kirill Tankov (22 years old) and defender Timur Kol (18 years old). But you have adult star players. Why focus on youth?
— They win the competition. Given the injuries of experienced players, they had their chance. They took advantage of it, they performed very well, they were even cited as an example for completing a game task. And tell me, in which other KHL club do 18-year-old guys play regularly? We are still not talking about a single change. We know teams where a young player comes out for 10 seconds so that a check mark is placed next to his name. We don’t work like that. If a hockey player deserves playing time, then he will play.
Timur Kol, who came to us from Omsk, spent the pre-season with us. He is showing himself to be great. A guy with character, powerful in size. A classic defender, like our legends – Kasatonov, Fetisov. And so we try to look for powerful guys in defense. It is important to keep your money, to have your own luck and character, self-confidence.
Timur is just such a guy. Young, bold. He skates very well and, thanks to this and his game intelligence, he behaves comfortably at the KHL level. How it will develop is another question. But we believe in Kola and we will continue to develop him. This is our task.
“We are very pleased that young people play for SKA – Vanya Demidov or 20-year-old Ivan Vydrenkov. They are the winners of the Kharlamov Cup. These are our students who have already succeeded in St. Petersburg, becoming MHL champions for the second time in the history of our club. And little by little they develop, work on themselves, win the competition even against older guys,” Rotenberg told .
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I’m Emma Smith, a dedicated journalist and avid storyteller. I have been writing for news websites for the past 5 years, reporting on hockey news and delivering in-depth analysis of the sport. In my current role as Author at Athletistic, I write about hockey events from around the world to keep followers up-to-date with what’s happening in the sport.
