Under-pressure SKA St. Petersburg coach Milos Riha has vowed not to resign, saying he is “not the type of person to leave a team” in an interview with RIA Novosti.
SKA fans jeered Riha after the 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 last week.
“I’m not the type of person to leave a team. If the management don’t want me to, I won’t go,” Riha told RIA Novosti.
Asked if he would stay in the post, he said: “Why not? What have I done? Have I killed St. Pete? I’ve done nothing of the sort, quite the reverse.”
SKA general manager Alexei Katsatonov told RIA Novosti on Thursday that the club’s board will meet soon to decide Riha’s fate. The Czech coach said he would make his case to remain.
“I’ll tell all the management what we’ve done over the whole season, what I didn’t like in the job, what I’d change, and they’ll just decide. And then we can start working again,” he said.
Riha 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.
