Football Season Guide

SKA Khabarovsk start their first ever season in the top flight of Russian football and will be the big enigma for the remainder of the division, with the team placed at the absolute outpost of Russia, right near the border with China. SKA were not expected to challenge for promotion in the second flight last season but they managed to find some good momentum after a hesitant start to the campaign and carried that on into the spring, finishing in the play-off places. Then they defied the odds to overcome Orenburg on penalties in the two-legged promotion play-off after a couple of goalless draws. It was a big effort from a limited team and it is clear that the current squad are the outstanding candidates for direct relegation back to the second division. However, the fact that most teams in the league face absolutely mammoth journeys for their games against SKA gives the newly-promoted side some sort of advantage and they will hope to make the most of it and scrape a position at least above the bottom two over the course of the demanding and tough season. Aleksei Poddubskiy took over as a manager halfway through last season after Aleksandr Grigoryan's departure and he has managed to make the team solid at the back and hard-working all over the pitch. However, the loss of important players like Pavel Karasev and Igor Udalyi, both joining Grigoryan at Anzhi, is bound to hurt the squad. Juan Lescano and Ruslan Koryan share the main responsibility in attack while Maksim Kazankov and Denis Dedechko are two other important players who will be expected to carry on the mantle this season. In terms of new additions, SKA have not really managed to attract genuine quality so far. Evgenyi Balyakin, Vitaly Fedetov and Maksim Tishkin are run-of-the-mill players at top-flight level and unlikely to make a profound difference while Konstantin Savichev and Anton Zemlyanukhin are very much shots in the dark. The former is a young winger who played for Spartak Moscow's reserve side and the latter a striker coming from the Thai League. All in all, this will be a season of getting experience at this level for the club as a whole and they are universally expected to go down, even if they do have some decent players that may surprise people.