Match " Zenit" and Akhmata" nearly ended in a massacre in St. Petersburg

Drama in St. Petersburg: Zenit snatchs victory from Akhmat in a match that almost ended in a mass brawl.

In St. Petersburg, the match of the eleventh round of the Russian Premier League was held, in which the local Zenit hosted the Grozny Akhmat. The meeting, served by the team of referee Rafael Shafeev, was replete with scoring episodes, sharp changes in game mood and extreme emotional intensity. The match ended with a heavy victory of the hosts with a score of 3: 2, but the main event of the evening almost became a mass slaughter on the field in the last minutes of the game.

The guests started the meeting well and managed to impose their game. In the twenty-fifth minute, Akhmata striker Lechi Sadulayev opened the scoring in the match, sending the ball into the net of the St. Petersburgers. However, after the break, the blue-white-blue radically changed their mood and came out on the lawn with a completely different team. Already in the first attack of the second half, Zenit restored balance: the defender of Grozny Arsen Adamov cut the ball into his own goal. Soon the hosts came forward. In the sixty-second minute, Maxim Glushenkov, having received a luxurious transfer from Artem Karpukas, confidently realized a one-on-one exit. It seemed that St. Petersburg completely seized control and without problems will bring the game to victory, as the southerners almost ceased to succeed in attack.

Nevertheless, the degree of confrontation on the field has steadily increased. In the seventy-eighth minute, Rafael Shafeev punished Akhmat midfielder Alexei Kasadjikov with a yellow card for a rough foul against Artem Karpukas. This decision of the referee caused an extremely violent reaction from the head coach of Grozny Stanislav Cherchesov. The mentor, who is rightfully considered one of the most polite and calm domestic specialists, expressed a demonstrative disagreement with the referee's verdict, for which he was also awarded a yellow card. This episode clearly demonstrated how much what is happening on the field affected an experienced coach.

The end of the match was really fiery. Grozny managed to complicate the task of the favorite, unexpectedly recouped in the eighty-sixth minute: Mohamed Konate closed the flank cross from Bogosavats with his head. Four minutes later, at the end of normal time, after Glushenkov's blow from the goalkeeper's square, John John was the first to finish, who brought three points to Zenit.

However, sports interest quickly faded into the background due to the unrest. In the sixth added minute after a foul on Konata, a push began on the field. The situation reached a critical point when the attacker of the hosts Alexander Sobolev and the midfielder of the guests Kalid Sidibé rushed at each other. Teammates urgently dragged Sobolev away from the opponent, and midfielder “Zenit” Wilmar Barrios was even forced to cover the forward’s mouth to prevent the escalation of the conflict. The arbitrator was forced to issue warnings: yellow cards for his behavior received Sobolev, Roman Vega and Denis Adamov.

The emotions did not subside after the final whistle. Alexander Sobolev made another attempt to find out the relationship with Sidibé. Kalid gestures invited the opponent to go to the tribune rooms, and Sobolev was ready to follow him, but the partners in Zenit physically did not let their forward, taking him aside. It is noteworthy that in the role of a peacemaker and a person who led the heated attacker away from the epicenter of the conflict, the famous football player, and now TV commentator Vladislav Radimov, acted.

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Thanks to this strong-willed and emotionally difficult victory, Zenit scored twenty-four points and rose to second place in the standings of the Russian Premier League. The leading positions were retained by Dynamo Moscow, which in its match defeated CSKA.