Both Plamen Konstantinov and his colleague Alexey Verbov fielded their strongest line-ups to date. Coach Kazantsev traditionally released Roman Romanovsky for the first serve, who was soon replaced by Artyom Volvich.
The first serious breakaway was successful for the Novosibirsk team: Ilya Kazachenkov first knocked Sam Deru out of the reception with a powerful serve, and after a timeout made the ace shortened - 14:10. Maxim Mikhailov, the diagonal Zenit player, did not get along well in attack, who made three mistakes by the score of 12:16.
Loko's players made mistakes - Omar Kurbanov hit twice in the out, then Martin Atanasov missed the court - 17:17. In the end, Zenit fought off Alexander Kostadinov's attack, but Deru was accurate in the counterattack - 23:21. Kurbanov returned to the set instead of Kostadinov, but immediately received an ace from Dmitry Volkov. And then Omar made a fatal mistake on serve - 25:22 in favor of the hosts. In total, in the first set, Novosibirsk made 8 mistakes on serve against Zenit's 2.
Mistakes by Kurbanov and Kazachenkov in attack helped Zenit to lead 12:9 in the second set, but the advantage of Kazan evaporated after Dmitry Lyzik's dense serves and his cool save in defense - 12:12. On Mikey Christenson's serves, Kazan again made a +3 margin. He made an ace and knocked out libero Sergey Melkozerov - 16:13. Kurbanov continued to lose a lot of goals at Lokomotiv and at the score of 15:19 he lost his place on the court to Sergey Savin. The difference in the score remained until the end of the set, which Kurbanov completed again with an error on serve.
6:2 - Zenit started the third game so powerfully thanks to three blocks and mistakes by the guests. On the kurazh, the Kazan team developed success to 8:2 thanks to cool connections from the back line. Konstantinov was forced to replace his main binder Konstantin Abaev, who was replaced by Igor Tisevich. Lyzik returned his team to the fight with two killer innings (8-5), but Kazan scored too powerful a move. Ace Deru's shortened serve and Volkov's block on Atanasov returned Kazan's advantage to +6 (14:8). As in the previous three games, it all ended with a mistake by the guests on serve - this time Martin Atanasov sent the ball into the net.
The winner of the two previous Russian Cup draws Zenit-Kazan reached the final of the tournament for the third time in a row, in which they will play Dynamo Moscow on December 24. The venue will be determined later.
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