"At Spartak, Karpin started demanding to play with his feet after Emery"

The RPL teams have started preparing for the spring part of the season. Many of them have already come out of vacations and gone to foreign training camps, having passed medical examinations before them. For example, the Samara Krylia Sovetov, which, after last year's drastic changes in leadership, coaching staff and composition, spent the summer and autumn parts of the season unevenly and went on a winter break in 12th place in the championship. After 18 rounds, Magomed Adiev's team has a two-point gap from the transition zone (13th-14th places) and five points from the direct relegation zone to the First League (15th-16th places).

In an interview with Izvestia, Krylia Sovetov goalkeeper Sergey Pesyakov explained what prevented the team from being higher, speculated about the possible reasons for Valery Karpin's failure as head coach of Dynamo Moscow, recalled the period of playing under his leadership in Spartak Moscow and Rostov, and also told what to expect from the new Spartak's head coach, Spaniard Juan Carcedo, shared his opinion on Matvey Safonov's successful penalty shootout for PSG.

"At some stage we were left without central defenders"

— How were the holidays celebrated?

— I spent almost all this time in Samara with my family. I took the kids to school and to training. It wasn't until December that my wife and I went to the Maldives for a week, right after the break in the season. On the 20th, we returned to Samara and spent time there.

— Is it difficult to return to work without excess weight?

— There are extra pounds, of course. But they leave as easily as they come. I don't have a big problem with that.

— How should Krylia improve compared to the first part of the season in order to finish in the top eight in the spring or at least stay in the RPL without any hassle without transitional matches?

— To put it bluntly, you need to score points.

"In what way?"

— Improve the quality of both defense and attack. But it's not just a question for me, it's a team effort between the coaching staff and the players. Basically, that's what we're going to work on.

— What prevented you from performing better in the first part of the season?

— Yes, a lot of things. There are a lot of nuances, starting with how we started preparing for the season, which team we were going to be in. During the season, the injuries have already taken their toll. Take the same Vadim Rakov, who was the team leader in the summer. And it wasn't just his loss that affected the results — at some stage we were left without any central defenders at all. It seemed like we had quite a lot of them, but then, as a result, there was no one left. All these moments have influenced where we are.

— You remembered that you did not start preparing for the season with the same squad that you eventually started with in the championship. Why did you start it successfully?

— I think emotions played a role. It happens when you have a new head coach, the start of the championship, and so on. When the head coach changes, everyone flies, everyone runs, everyone rushes across the field. It's no secret — it's always motivating. And then something broke a little somewhere... Again, all that we have listed above is physical fitness, injuries.

— In the summer, with the arrival of Magomed Adiev as head coach, Krylia's game scheme changed, they started playing three central defenders. How does this affect the goalkeeper?

— It doesn't affect the goalkeeper, but it affects team actions. From the goalkeeper's point of view, to put it simply, here is the ball, and it doesn't matter to us where we play, in the English Premier League or in the Second League of Russian football. Anyone can spit into the nine of your gates from 30 meters away. Therefore, this does not affect us in any way. Well, if we are not talking about individual situations, such as that of Valery Georgievich (Karpin. — Ed.), which requires goalkeepers to play a lot with their feet.

— It is in this context that it is interesting to see what has changed in Krylia. Have goalkeepers started playing less with their feet under Adiev than they did under Igor Osinkin?

— Well, of course, yes. There are no such requirements here. Everything depends on the requirements. After all, I played a lot with my feet at Rostov, not because I liked it, but because I didn't like it. But because there were such requirements, I did it.

"It will be great if Gusev remains at the head of Dynamo."

Captain of the blue and white Daniil Fomin — about the new head coach of the team, the failed results and successes of his father in the Cup of Russia

"At Rostov, Abaev and I recommended the goalkeeper coach to Karpin's staff."

— Karpin said back in 2013 at Spartak that you are at the core because you play with your feet better than other goalkeepers. Many people remembered these words for a long time. It turns out that you forced yourself to comply with his demands?

— Well, what do you mean, forced? This is my job. I did what I had to do. It's clear that at some points I could have played easier if there wasn't such a requirement for playing with my feet. But when you play easier, you get an instruction from the coaching staff: "No, you have to play this way and that way."

— Did it become easier after Alexander Guteev started working as the goalkeeper coach of Krylia starting this season, under whose leadership you made your senior debut with Shinnik in the 2000s?

- yes. I've known Alexander Sergeevich for a very long time. I got to him back in 2005 at the Shinnik. But then we also worked together for one and a half to two years at Rostov under Valery Georgievich.

— Before Karpin Vitaly Kafanov joined the staff?

— Yes, yes, yes. We were at Rostov with Ilya Abaev at the time. And the club's sports director asked us who we would recommend as a goalkeeper coach. We recommended Alexander Sergeevich Guteev, with whom Ilya also crossed paths — they worked for Volga for several years.

— So when Karpin took over as Rostov's head coach at the end of 2017, he didn't have a goalkeeping coach on his staff, and it was you and Abayev who lobbied Guteev?

— Well, not to say that they lobbied. We did not come to the leadership with his candidacy on our own. This is Artashes Vladimirovich Harutyunyants (the then president of Rostov. — Ed.) and Alexey Anatolyevich Ryskin asked our opinion, we named Guteev. As a result, the club agreed on his candidacy.

— To what extent did he adapt to Karpin's demands regarding the goalkeeper's kicking game?

— In the early years at Rostov, we didn't play like this under Valery Georgievich. We also had a five-defender scheme, like we have now at Krylia. Then they gradually began to switch to a system with four defenders, and just with the arrival of Vitaly Vitalievich to the coaching staff, the goalkeepers gradually began to switch to playing with their feet.

In 2017-2018, there was no such requirement — we played easier. Since 2019, when Alexander Sergeevich was no longer in the team, they started playing the kind of football that Karpin's Rostov is associated with.

I remember in the spring of 2019, we finished in ninth place in the championship, and at the end of that season, when we had already secured a place in the RPL, we did not fly anywhere and did not rise anywhere, Georgich said: "Let's try to play differently in the last five or six rounds." We started to rebuild, and from the next season we played more and more like this.

"The feeling that I haven't finished what I started will remain forever"

The head coach of the Russian national team, Valery Karpin, talks about combining positions, financial literacy, poor sleep and the main sport in the country.

"Safonov has always been prone to analysis"

— Did you watch the winning match of the Intercontinental Cup for PSG with Matvey Safonov in the goal?

— Not the match itself, but of course I saw the penalty shootout in which Matvey hit four shots.

— Is there an explanation for how he did it?

— It should be noted here that Motya has always been prone to analysis. He was able to analyze qualitatively who was hitting, who was running, where he was looking. Well, we all saw that he was acting with a cheat sheet (before the penalty shootout, Safonov watched the paper wrapped in his towel with an analysis of how the Flamengo players beat. — Ed.) — apparently, the coaching staff helped him with this. Well, Safonov's skill took its toll — there's nowhere without him either.

— Do you use cheat sheets before the penalty shootout?

— Well, yes, on the water bottles he wrote down who was hitting how. This was more often done for cup matches, where there could be a penalty shootout when many opposing players would beat them. So in normal situations, when a penalty can be awarded during the game, you know approximately who will kick. And remember how he can do it.

In general, do you know what kind of topic has been going on in recent years? The guys and I laugh sometimes.: "He knows that I know that he knows" (laughs). The goalkeepers and the hitters have already learned each other so much that, relatively speaking, I know that the player will hit to the right, he always hits there, and he knows that I will jump there. At first, goalkeepers began to study this at the time. And now the batters are also studying. Everyone knows everything. This is already a psychological topic.

— When you started playing in the 2000s, goalkeepers didn't study the penalty shootout like that?

— There was no such thing at all. Everything was based on intuition.

— After Safonov suffered a fracture during that penalty shootout, do you believe that upon his return to the lineup he will still have a chance to recapture Chevalier's place at the PSG base?

— Injuries are always out of time. In general, judging by what I read in the press, local journalists and fans were not happy with Chevalier even before his December injury, after which Safonov was in the base for several matches. So let's see how the Frenchman shows himself now that Motya is injured. Although the last match, in the French Super Cup against Marseille, he played well — in any case, he also won a penalty shootout, took two 11-meter shots. So it's hard to predict anything.

"The former Dynamo physical training coach is a professional, but there are nuances in communicating with people"

— Do you understand why Valery Karpin failed to achieve success with Dynamo last year?

— No, of course not. It is necessary to be inside, to see the training process, near-football moments. Someone has a football moment, let's say. I don't think Valery Georgievich left just because of football moments. Yes, the result is, frankly, bad. But I don't think that's the whole point of care.

— Rumors about a conflict between a number of Dynamo players and Luis Martinez, a physical training coach from Karpin's staff, have made a lot of noise. And Roland Gusev, who assisted Valery Georgievich and replaced him, criticized the Spaniard altogether, assessing the physical readiness of the team by two. Based on your work experience at Rostov, what would you say about this specialist?

— Professional with a capital letter. A man who knows his business. It seems to me that he only has a certain nuance in communicating with people. But I didn't have any problems with him — we parted well. No one forces you to be friends with him, to communicate well. But Louis is just a professional in every cell of his body. Accordingly, it requires the same from the rest. But sometimes the pitch is not clear to everyone. Either the language barrier is affecting, or the person himself is like that. I won't judge whether this is good or bad, but there are some nuances.

— When the scandals around Martinez at Dynamo happened in the fall, I studied his past biography and was surprised that Luis was at Rostov with Karpin only in his first coming to the club, in 2017-2021, then he left with him and Jonathan Alba for the Russian national team. When in March 2022, due to the suspension of the national team from international tournaments, Karpin was allowed to combine this work with the club, he returned to Rostov with Alba and took Viktor Onopko with him, but without Martinez. Do you know why Luis only worked for the national team for three years before joining Dynamo last year?

— If I'm not mistaken, then for family reasons he could not return to Rostov then, taking into account all the transport matters, when the airport was closed and it was only possible to travel to Moscow by train for a very long time.

— Besides how much Rostov has to spend time and effort on trains since 2022, every fitness specialist counted.

— In fact, we worked completely according to his methodology even without Louis. Thanks to this, we took the fourth place in 2023, and the seventh next season. His assistant Alvaro remained in the team, he still works at Rostov. And he continued to do what Louis had done before.

— Will Karpin still have a chance to work at a top club? Will he use it?

— I think there will definitely be a chance. And whether he will use it or not, no one knows. It's quite difficult to predict anything in our football. As we know, the top clubs don't give much time to get results. Their coaches change frequently.

— When you left Rostov in 2024, how did Karpin differ from himself at the time of Spartak?

— For me, the most important difference is that he has already killed a player in Rostov. This has not happened at Spartak yet, at least in the first years of his work there, in 2009-2010.

— How did it manifest itself?

— Even though he played two-way games with us at every training session. Well, in general, the analysis at Rostov was already more in—depth - theoretical classes, game analysis. This was also the case at Spartak, but at Rostov, Valery Georgievich had already laid everything out on the shelves, everything was very clear.

— Juan Carcedo, who worked at the club in 2012 as Unai Emery's assistant, was appointed Spartak's head coach. Did you remember him then?

— I remember him very well, but it's hard to say anything specific. I associate that period exclusively with Emery. It is clear that the entire coaching staff discussed something behind closed doors - tactics, playing style, etc. But the team always got all the installations, all the information from Unai himself.

— What was interesting about those six months under Emery from a goalkeeper's point of view?

— The most important thing is playing with your feet.

— Was there more of this than under Karpin?

— Valery Georgievich started demanding to play with his feet after Unai. I remember perfectly well how I came to the training camp under Emery as the fourth goalkeeper. And after the training camp, he became a candidate for the first. Thanks to his legs. That is, following the results of several friendly matches at the training camp, Unai began to see me as a competitor to Andrei Dikan and Artyom Rebrov. Just because of the legs.

— Should the current goalkeepers of Spartak, Alexander Maksimenko and Ilya Pomazun, prepare for this, if we imagine that Carcedo will make the same demands on them as Emery?

— Yes, they don't need to prepare — they already know how to play with their feet perfectly. In my opinion, in recent years, under every coach, Spartak has tried to attack from the bottom. Maybe only this season, when Zaba (Anton Zabolotny. — Ed.) appeared in the lineup, they extended the broadcasts. And so everything is at the bottom.