Melosha's life: how the KHL preseason ended with fights and a thriller

The KHL clubs' pre-season training ended with several unexpectedly heated matches. In the final of the Moscow Mayor's Cup, Dynamo Moscow defeated their Minsk teammates (4:1), but the end of the meeting was remembered for a series of fights, in one of which the Canadian defender of the Belarusian team, Nicolas Melosh, was seriously injured. In Omsk, Avangard and Yaroslavl's Lokomotiv, the winner of the last two Gagarin Cups, played a truly combative match at the Blinov Cup. There is less than a week left before the start of the KHL regular season.

A fight at the Moscow Mayor's Cup

Mass brawls between hockey players are a fairly rare occurrence for preseason matches. They usually happen in the games of principled rivals. But now Dynamo Moscow and Minsk have turned a new page in their relations. These teams met in the final of the Moscow Mayor's Cup.

The Russian club won (4:1), showing good readiness for the season in the updated squad under the new head coach Leonid Tambiev. But the main events happened at the end of the match, when the result was already clear. The defender of the Belarusian team, Nicolas Melosh, saw his teammate pushed by the Muscovite striker Andrei Nikonov, and went to intercede for his friend. Nikonov accepted the fight in accordance with the traditions of hockey fights.

He managed to land one punch, and then, with the help of a wrestling technique, knocked the Canadian to the ice. Melosh twisted his leg when he fell, and he was leaving the playground on a stretcher. Nikonov received two minutes of removal for this. But after the fine was completed, Minsk residents staged a hunt for him, which ended in a mass brawl, in which Chris Tierney was the most active.

As a result, Nikonov and several Minsk residents were removed. And after the final siren, there was another fight, which the judges barely stopped.

After the award ceremony, a video with Nikonov's apologies to Melosh was released on social networks of the Moscow Dynamo. The Canadian himself, apparently, has been out for a long time, but Minsk residents have not yet given specific dates for his absence from the ice.

Muscovites believe that it was an accident, claiming that Nikonov did not want to injure his opponent. And Leonid Tambiev noted the good fighting qualities of his team, which has seriously updated the squad since his arrival as head coach and has become the main discovery of the summer offseason.

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Pancake Cup

The tournament in Omsk was won by the current Gagarin Cup winner Yaroslavl Lokomotiv, who retained almost the entire squad of the sample of two triumphant seasons. However, he starts again with a new head coach. Dmitry Kvartalnov became one of them. He already led Lokomotiv in 2017-2019, having managed to introduce many young players to the main team, a significant part of which is the backbone of the railwaymen now.

This summer, Kvartalnov did not change himself, and joined a group of hockey players who won the Kharlamov Cup in May as part of the Loko youth team. Vadim Dudorov, Artyom Kuzin, Andrey Pustovoy — either did not play at the adult level at all, or played it quite a bit.

The match with Omsk gathered 12,000 spectators, which is a lot for a pre-season meeting. But there was a special subtext, as Avangard had consistently been eliminated from the KHL playoffs by Lokomotiv in the seventh game in the previous three seasons. Moreover, in the last two cases, the seventh matches ended in the middle of the second overtime — 3:2 and 4:3 in favor of the "railwaymen".

It is not surprising that the audience in Omsk filled the local arena at the end of August for a match with a principal rival, where the teams did not spare themselves, playing at the maximum level of struggle and speed, which is rare for preseason games. As a result, Avangard won the shootout (2-1), but Lokomotiv took the trophy again. In terms of points scored, Yaroslavl was higher in the table of Sibir, Avangard, Severstal and Neftekhimik.

The hosts won two more pre—season tournaments - Metallurg Magnitogorsk beat everyone at the Ivan Romazan Memorial, and SKA St. Petersburg won the Nikolai Puchkov Tournament.

The first matches of the new KHL season will be held on September 5.