Agidel!

Agidel Ufa hoist the Women’s Hockey League Cup after Monday’s victory!  (Image Source)

For the first time ever, Agidel Ufa are champions of Russian women’s hockey!  Agidel finished off a three-game sweep of arch-rivals Tornado Moscow Oblast in the Women’s Hockey Final today.  The clinching game ended 4-1 in Agidel’s favour, with two goals off the stick of the illustrious Olga Sosina.  A tremendous season for the team from Bashkortostan, and all congratulations to them!

Read on, for more on the Final and some other thoughts!

The Final was a match-up of arch-rivals, as Agidel faced off against Tornado Moscow Oblast.  Tornado, winners of nine of the last twelve Russian championships including the most recent three in row, nonetheless came into the Final as underdogs.  The regular-season title in 2017-18 (which would have been the national championship had the playoff system not been introduced this season) went to Agidel, and by nine points over 24 games.  Furthermore, Tornado were without the services of a very good second-line scorer in Lyudmila Belyakova, out long-term with a knee injury.  The defending champs were also missing 15-year-old prodigy Yelizaveta Shkaleva, she of the nine goals and 11 points in her first 11 Women’s Hockey League games, who was off playing at the European Cup with the U16 Russian national team.  But they still had at their disposal the league’s top point-getter in Anna Shokhina (24 gp, 22-36-58) and its best goalscorer in Alevtina Shtaryova (24 gp, 23-18-41), not to mention the likes of Mariya Batalova and Nina Pirogova on defence along with a resolute netminder in Nadezhda Alexandrova.  So Head Coach Alexei Chistyakov, who also runs the Russian women’s national team, had reason for both worry and confidence.

As for Agidel, they got some good news before the Final when Hungarian forward Fanni Gasparics returned from the Division 1A Women’s Worlds, where she had been playing for Hungary and winning the tournament’s Best Forward prize.  Head Coach Denis Afinogenov’s team is a deep one, and it starts with forward Olga Sosina, about whom we talk quite a lot here at the blog.  She came in as the post-season leading scorer, with six points in Agidel’s two-game first-round sweep of SKIF Nizhny Novgorod, and — spoiler alert — she wasn’t finished.  The Ufa team also boasts one of the best goalies in the league this season in Anna Prugova, as well as a superb defensive group.  I could go on at length (and did, in the preview of the Final), but for now suffice it to say that Agidel have a tremendous assemblage of talent at all positions.

And so to Game 1 of the Final in Ufa, and an entertaining back-and-forth affair it was — both teams adopted a wide-open style.  Agidel began on the front foot, and took the lead mid-way through the first period on a goal by — who else — Sosina.  Tornado then got the upper hand in the second period, but Agidel goalie Prugova was not in a giving frame of mind; in fact, the home team increased their lead to 2-0, thanks to defender Alexandra Kapustina’s goal.  Tornado had their chances in the third period, but this game really did belong to Prugova, who would stop all 32 shots that came her way.  It finished with no further scoring, and Agidel’s 2-0 victory meant a 1-0 lead in the best-of-five Final

Game 2, once again at Agidel’s home rink in the capital of Bashkortostan, would turn out to be a fiery one.  But it began much as Game 1 did, with Agidel emerging from the first period with a 1-0 lead — Inna Dyubanok the scorer this time.  And once again, Agidel extended their advantage in the middle frame, only this time they ran the score to 3-0 via two goals in two minutes; first it was Yelizaveta Rodnova, who has been increasingly impressive over the course of this season and is definitely a name to watch in 2018-19, getting the puck past Tornado goalie Nadezhda Alexandrova, and then Alexandra Vafina tallied Agidel’s third.  So off we went to the final period, with the home team looking well in control.

Olga Sosina (l.) and Anna Shchukina celebrate an Agidel Ufa goal in Game 2 of the Final. (Image Source)

But then — an ugly moment.  Tornado’s Nina Pirogova, an excellent young defender but one who does cross the line from time to time, ran Agidel captain Yekaterina Lebedeva into the boards in what was a flat-out bodycheck, and a late, high, one as well.  Lebedeva’s head hit the boards with some force, and though she eventually departed under her own steam, her night was finished.  So was Pirogova’s, as she was quite correctly assessed a major and a game misconduct.  Tempers flared thereafter, and though the game never got out of hand, it did turn into something of a parade to the penalty box.  It was Tornado who took adavantage; within a minute and a half of each other, Anna Shokhina and Mariya Batalova both struck on the powerplay, and suddenly Agidel’s lead was down to 3-2 with plenty of time left.  But the Ufans rallied well, and hung on despite increasing Tornado pressure.  The visitors could not find an equalizer, and 3-2 it finished.  Agidel went up 2-0 in the series, and found themselves just a win away from that first-ever championship.

For Agidel, the problem was that the series now shifted back to their opponents’ home in Dmitrov, just outside Moscow.  And Tornado got a further boost with the return from international duty of Yelizaveta Shkaleva.  Somewhat to my surprise, I confess, both Pirogova and Lebedeva were in the lineups for their respective teams; I had been fairly sure that Pirogova would draw a suspension, and the blow to Lebedeva’s head looked a sure concussion.  But both were present and accounted for in Game 3.

Despite good chance to make the series a tense one again, Tornado came out flat in Game 3.  And as they had done in the previous two games of the Final, Agidel went ahead in the first period, Sosina burying Vafina’s good cross-crease pass.  At literally the last second of the opening frame, it was Vafina herself who made it 2-0 for Agidel, firing home after a nifty short feed from defender Anna Shchukina.  Then, early in the second period, Sosina went for a skate through a seemingly mesmerized Tornado defence:

Go ahead to 52:53 if the video does not automatically start there.

3-0 for Agidel on Sosina’s second goal of the game, and for Tornado, looking increasingly out-of-sorts, things went from bad worse when up-and-comer Alyona Zubkova scored midway through the second to increase the visitors’ lead to four.  Now, Tornado are a good team even when not playing their best, and they did carve out some chances, but Prugova was once again spectacular and Agidel now knew that unless disaster struck they would be champions.  In the third, Agidel kept things simple, parried Tornado’s attacks when necessary, and worried little about increasing their lead.  An effective strategy, although Prugova’s bid for a second shutout in the Final was spoiled by a Shokhina goal late on.  It was far too late, however — just 14 seconds remained — to be anything but a small consolation for Tornado, and the final score read 4-1 as the jubilant Agidel players piled onto the ice in celebration of that long-awaited national championship.  Said Sosina, who won the playoff scoring title by going 6-5-11 in five games:

“Finally, it happened!  Everyone invested a piece of herself in the victory.  This was not one player, everybody tried hard and created the result, but Anna Prugova is our goddess!”

Fair enough, as Prugova’s sv% in the Final was a sparkling .965.

Anna Prugova. (Image Source)

For Tornado, the end of their three-year run as champions was foreshadowed when they went just 4-4 through the first eight games of the regular season.  Though matters improved for them thereafter (Tornado’s final record was 17-7), they never really looked like the dominating force they had been in previous seasons.  The Olympics, at which Tornado were heavily represented on the Russian team, may not have helped matters, but the fact remains that the team did not play up to its potential.  On the other hand, Tornado’s potential is very high, and will remain so next season.  Anna Shokhina is a tremendous player, and her line with Shtaryova and Yelena Dergachyova is a fearsome one.  On defence, Pirogova (despite her sins), Batalova, and Angelina Goncharenko are the core of a very good unit.  And it should be a joy to watch the progress over the next few seasons of the precociously talented Shkaleva.  We will see what changes, if any, Tornado make over the summer, but the best idea for them might be to refrain to from changing too much at all.

But this time the day, and indeed the season, belong to Agidel Ufa!  It is fully deserved after a season in which they went 21-4 and won six games out of seven, including the three in the Final, against their arch-rivals Tornado.  There can be no question now as to which of those two teams has the upper hand.  The depth of the Agidel roster, and its disciplined play, made beating them a nigh-impossible task in 2017-18.  And of course, they have Olga Sosina.  It was something of an oddity (and we will talk about it here at some point) that Sosina was Agidel’s only Olympian in 2018, but it may have been a blessing in disguise; it left her club to practice together through the entire break for the Games.  The resulting teamwork (and Agidel were already very good in that regard) was on full display in the latter part of the season and through the playoffs.  And there is absolutely no reason not to expect them to pose a very stiff challenge next season to any team looking to dethrone them.

And so congratulations to Agidel Ufa, Champions of Russia for the first time — it is a thoroughly-deserved honour, and I hope the team and its fans are enjoying it to the utmost!  And a nod of appreciation to Tornado for their fine three-year run at the top of the standings.

Thank you for reading!

Agidel Ufa, 2017-18 Women’s Hockey League Champions! (Image Source)