By Georgy Shablyuk
Recently, Dinamo Minsk has been unpredictable. After a series of after-match penalty shootouts, the team defeated Severstal Cherepovets (2:1) and then lost to Atlant (1:7). A couple of days later, Dinamo met SKA St. Petersburg. Despite their loss (2:3), the Belarusians played an exciting end-to-end game which was appreciated by the fans.
Lubomir Pokovic’s Dinamo played its latest home match against Lokomotiv Yaroslavl. Our ex-player, Jeff Platt, has already played for Lokomotiv for a month. Happily, the Belarusians confidently won (3:1). For over half of the match, no situations were created near the goals, and fans at the Minsk-Arena were seemingly bored. However, soon after the break, the hosts managed to score twice in quick succession, something which happens rarely. The initial scorer was, Tomasz Surowy, followed up by Alexander Materukhin.
The score remained unchanged until the second break. In the final round, Lokomotiv, which is currently struggling for a play-off position, became more aggressive in style and created several threats at Dmitry Milchakov’s goal. However, they failed to score. However, Dinamo’s captain, Alexey Kalyuzhny, assisted by Andrey Stas, shot one into the Lokomotiv goal with just 4 and a half minutes remaining on the clock, and Lokomotiv managed to score a consolation goal just 90 seconds before the end.
As a result, Dinamo has actually executed the programme of home matches of the CHL-2013/14 regular championship. Their single home match after the long Olympic break is scheduled for March 2nd against Dinamo Riga.
