0‑1 against KAMAZ, and the road stops here. Cup exits are quick deaths — no second leg, no next week, just the league from now until May.
The terraces5 Oct 2026
The boos come down from three sides
“We pay for this every fortnight. The least we want is somebody who looks like he cares.” 10 of the 23 senior players walked off into it; the rest were not playing.
Ilja Molteninov was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
There is a figure at which a wage bill stops being ambitious and becomes the reason nothing else is possible, and this club has reached it. Nothing is left over for a transfer, a stand or a rainy afternoon.
Four or five weekends of consistency, judged against everybody in the division doing his job. Ilja Molteninov has come out of that comparison in the side, and Kuban have had the benefit of every one of those afternoons.
36 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Kuban lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Kuban can pretend not to have heard.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Kuban this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
Nobody's fault and entirely his: a goal that goes into the book with his name against it and nothing about it intended. Kuban deserved better, and so did he.
50 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Kuban lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
3 wins on the spin now, and the question has changed from whether the run ends to who ends it. Confidence like this cannot be bought; it has to be earned exactly this way.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Kuban this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
A 3‑1 win over Dinamo Vladivostok, earned rather than given, and the sort of afternoon that sends everyone home talking about next week instead of this one.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Sergey Terekhov is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Kuban this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Player ratings10 Aug 2026
Mikhail Ageev was on a different afternoon to everybody else
9.95. There are performances a supporter describes to somebody who was not there and cannot quite convey; this was one, and the number does not help either.
There is a particular warmth a ground reserves for a 23-year-old it feels ownership of. Gleb Bakharev has it now, and everything he does for the rest of his time here will be measured against the goodwill he was handed for free.
The one version of being left out a player cannot argue with, and the one he takes worst. Somebody else has been better and the team sheet says so, in public, every week until it changes.