The pressure on Dynamo coach Sergei Silkin intensified Monday after his team’s 4-0 thrashing at the hands of capital city rivals Spartak, with former player Alexander Panov calling on him to step down.
Silkin took over last year and led Dynamo to a third-place league finish in his first season in charge, but the end of the season was marred by reports of rifts with senior players including Russia midfielder Igor Semshov and ex-Liverpool striker Andriy Voronin.
Dynamo are bottom of the Russian Premier League after three defeats in three games this season, losing to Spartak, champions Zenit St. Petersburg and minnows FC Volga.
After Sunday’s defeat, Silkin said he was “prepared for any decision from the board” and criticized Spartak for refusing to rearrange the game in light of Dynamo’s Europa League match at Dundee United on Thursday, which ended in a 2-2 draw.
“I think Silkin should probably leave his post. Unfortunately, Sergei Nikolaevich [Silkin] hasn’t coped with this enormous responsibility,” former Dynamo and Zenit striker Panov told R-Sport on Monday.
Citing Spartak’s ex-Valencia coach Unai Emery as an example of an inspirational leader, Panov said: “Dynamo needs a different coach who has the respect of the players, then they’ll play football differently.”
Silkin received qualified support from former Dynamo and Soviet Union midfielder Valery Maslov, who played 319 games for the team in the 1960s and 70s and said he blamed the Dynamo players.
If Silkin is replaced, “it’ll all be the same thing,” Maslov said, adding that Dynamo’s problem lay in expensive foreign signings like Hungarian winger Balazs Dzsudzsak, German-Bosnian midfielder Zvjezdan Misimovic and Belarusian midfielder Pavel Nyakhaychyk.
The Spartak defeat “just underlines how we buy Dzsudzsak, Misimovic and Nyakhaychyk and they love money but they won’t die for our football and they’re hardly teaching our guys to play,” he said.
The result was that Dynamo played like “a team from the yard” against Spartak, he added.
