Articles by Theokritos
Montreal 1972. Faced with the decision how to line up against the Soviet Union in Game 1 of the upcoming Summit Series, Team Canada head coach Harry Sinden decides to go with four forward lines and two defensive pairings (plus one spare). His reasoning: Constant Canadian attacks with four lines...
As head coach of the Soviet national team, Arkadi Chernyshov won no fewer than 12 World Championship and Olympic gold medals. But as Anatoli Tarasov wrote:
Do not imagine Chernyshov as some kind of poster boy for good fortune who is always lucky and whose fate is bright and without clouds...
Future Soviet sports star Vsevolod Bobrov was born on December 1, 1922. He grew up in the town of Sestroretsk at the Gulf of Finland and spent his spare time playing soccer and bandy – a hockey-like game on ice with a ball instead of a puck and with 10 skaters per team. The talented youngster...
The Russians were on the move all the time. We could hardly keep up with them. They interchanged positions to the extent of the outside-left skating over to the right-wing and vice versa. I have never seen hockey played like it. It was a Chinese puzzle to try to follow the players in their...
Anatoli Tarasov was the most vocal figure in Soviet hockey – so vocal, in fact, that hockey historians tend to forget he wasn't actually the head coach of the Soviet national team during its dynasty years from 1963 to 1972. Tarasov was only the assistant or associate coach. The head coach was...
In March 1953, Stan Obodiac handed Anatoli Tarasov a book by Lloyd Percival. It's not clear whether the book was How to Play Better Hockey or The Hockey Handbook and how much of it Tarasov was able to translate. What we do know is that six months later, Tarasov implemented a new training routine...
In his biography Lloyd Percival: Coach and Visionary, Gary Mossman reports the following:
The late Canadian sportswriter, Jim Coleman, frequently related a story told to him by Lethbridge Maple Leaf hockey player Stan Obodiac, who was of Ukrainian decent, spoke fluent Russian and sent regular...
In 1945, Nikolai Romanov became chairman of the All-Union Committee for Physical Culture and Sports, the governmental body overseeing sports in the Soviet Union. Anatoli Tarasov would later characterize him in the following manner:
Granted, he scolded me more often than he praised me, but all...
Eduard Georgievich Ivanov (1938-2013) was a staple on the defence of the Soviet national team from 1962/3 until 1966/67. A curious episode from the 1964 Olympics in Innsbruck, however, has led some to falsely assume he played as a forward in that tournament. The confusion was caused by no-one...
In his SIHR blog entry from April 5 ("A Londoner upsets the Reds – Wembley Lions versus the Soviet Union 1955"), Stewart Roberts takes a look at the series of games the Soviet national team played in England in November and December 1955, most notably the narrow 3-2 win over Wembley Lion on...
It has taken a few years from the idea to the realization, but finally we're able to get this project off the ground:
In association with the Society for International Hockey Research (SIHR), HFBoards presents the History of Hockey book feature. The SIHR will offer their writing members the...
