Volgar Astrakhan and Volga Ulyanovsk drew 0:0 in regular time before the Cup Regions Path quarter-final was decided by penalties on Tuesday evening. The match ended 0-0 after ninety minutes, but the shootout that followed was far from routine. We had tipped the hosts to win, but that's not how the afternoon unfolded — the game simply refused to be decided in open play.
There were no shots on target from either side. Volgar held 52 per cent possession and won six corners to Volga's four, but neither team managed to test the goalkeeper. The closest thing to incident came at sixteen minutes when Kamil Ibragimov received a yellow card for the visitors. By then, you could already sense the caution both managers had instilled.
Substitutions piled up as the clock ran down. Volga brought on Vadim Livadnov at the interval and Ruslan Shagiakhmetov at sixty minutes. Volgar responded with three changes at sixty-three — Vyacheslav Krotov, Evgeniy Kovalevskiy and Kirill Kolesnichenko — before adding Vladislav Morozov, Vladislav Yakovlev and Danil Novikov at seventy. Alan Agaev came on at seventy-six. Andrey Kostin picked up the second yellow card at eighty-six.
Then came the penalties. Eight goals and three misses across eleven attempts. Aleksei Pavlishin scored for his side, but the shootout was too close to call until the final kicks. The statistics don't tell you anything useful here — zero shots on target from both teams, yet eleven penalty takers were called upon. That is what happens when a match goes nowhere.
The result means the quarter-final was decided in the most brutal way possible. Neither team created enough to win, but both committed to the shootout. The hosts had won their last match 3-0 against Spartak Nalchik and were on a better run, but Volga's 3-0 victory over Arsenal Tula on Friday showed they could handle themselves. In the end, neither advantage mattered.
