SKA Coach Riha Stays Despite KHL Failure - Team

© RIA Novosti . Alexey Danitchev / Go to the mediabankEvgeny Artyukhin
Evgeny Artyukhin - Sputnik International
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SKA St. Petersburg is retaining coach Milos Riha, despite the hockey team's humiliating exit from the KHL playoffs earlier this month, the team said Friday.

SKA St. Petersburg is retaining coach Milos Riha, despite the hockey team's humiliating exit from the KHL playoffs earlier this month, the team said Friday.

SKA fans jeered Czech coach after his team’s 4-0 series defeat to Dynamo Moscow in the KHL Western Conference final was capped by a 6-1 thrashing in the Russian capital.

But Riha defiantly vowed to remain in the post, and got a crucial vote of confidence on Friday.

"Milos Riga will continue working with the team into next season," the team's general manager Alexei Kasatonov told RIA Novosti. "He has a contract, he is working by it."

Riha earlier this month criticized the fans’ jeering of him after the Dynamo game, and suggested they were too demanding.

“I laughed at it. I expected all season that they’d rise up again. I think that even if we’d won the Cup, they’d have turned up again and shouted something.”

Noting SKA’s record of firing famous coaches in recent seasons, Riha suggested he had been treated unfairly compared to his illustrious predecessors.

“A lot of coaches have left SKA. Barry [Smith] left, the Italian [Ivan Zanatta], Vaclav Sikora, but there hasn’t been such a negative attitude to the coach, so much criticism.”

With funding from Russian gas giant Gazprom, SKA has assembled a team of famous players, including ex-NHL players Evgeny Artyukhin, Maxim Afinogenov and Denis Grebeshkov, but has been unable to achieve its aim of a first major trophy.

Riha has won one Czech and two Slovak league titles as a coach, and joined SKA after taking Atlant Moscow Region to the 2011 Gagarin Cup final, knocking out the St. Petersburg team in the playoffs.

 

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