Match Preview: Dynamo U-21 vs. Zenit U-21: Where to Watch, News, and All About the Opponent

You can follow the progress of the duel in the match center on our website, as well as on the club's social networks VKontakte and Telegram.

The live video broadcast of the game can be watched:

– on the official Super League account on VKontakte at this link

– on the official account of WFC "Zenit" on VKontakte at this link

The meeting starts at 10:00 Moscow time.

As always, our girls are waiting for the support of Dynamo fans at the stadium. All home matches of the youth team of WFC "Dynamo" this season are held at the training base in Novogorsk. How to get to the VTB UTS "Novogorsk-Dynamo" and support the Dynamo girls, you can find out here.

Entrance to the match with "Zenit" will be free.

View the full schedule of home and away matches for the youth team "Dynamo" in the 2024 season can always be found here.

Our team spent the first round, and accordingly the opening of the new season of the Youth League, in the Moscow district of Strogino - against a well-known team of the same name. So familiar that in the two years of its existence, the Dynamo youth team met with the Strogino Sports Club for the 7th time! This is not counting the fact that the main team of our club also played its first match in history, albeit a friendly, against Strogino, and in its first match in the Russian Cup it completely defeated the Strogino team with an incredible score of 11:1. This game still remains the most productive in the history of the club.

It is also interesting that the youth teams of Dynamo and Strogino also played their last match last season against each other. And they closed that season with a goalless draw in Strogino. But now they had to open the season and even before the start of the game there was a feeling that the zeros on the scoreboard would not be repeated. If only because the teams had changed so much compared to that October match that I didn’t even want to think about any zero games.

We talked about the additions and departures of our team in the preview of the season and the first match in the Youth League, but for Strogino the main event of the off-season was the departure of head coach Vadim Kozlov and two leading players to the Spartak Sports Club - midfielder Valeria Zarubina and forward Ksenia Kuleshova. Of course, this could not affect the team, which is almost entirely composed of its own students.

But there are many new faces in the Dynamo youth team. Take, for example, the very last match of the 2023 season with Strogino. In comparison, 7 new players appeared in the Dynamo lineup, 5 of them in the starting lineup: defenders Arina Volobueva (she is also the new captain of the youth team), Tanya Malesiya and Anastasia Gnennaya, midfielders Lamunat Mustafaeva and Taisiya Razvorotneva.

But still, the main characters on the field in the game against Strogino were football players who had already played for Dynamo and in the Youth League, and even for the main team: Daniella Petrova opened the scoring in the 10th minute, and consolidated the advantage of the white team. blue with her double Kristina Yakovenko. However, the game was put to rest by the team’s newcomer, Lamunat Mustafayeva, who set the final score – 4:1 in favor of Dynamo. A confident victory as the best start to the new season!

— Not everyone is happy, but this is only the first match of the championship. I think the girls were nervous, which led to more mistakes than we expected. However, we had a fairly significant advantage during the first half, in which we scored two goals and missed several good chances.

At the beginning of the second half, not everything went smoothly, the organization of the attack was not going well, and we conceded a goal. However, after the third goal, we no longer let the game out of our control and brought the match to victory,” said Mikhail Kobyakov, head coach of the Dynamo youth team, about the first game of the season.

The heroine of the meeting and the author of the team’s first double in the new season, Kristina Yakovenko, noted the strength of the opponent, but also complained about the implementation of scoring chances:

“We were preparing for this match; we knew that we would face a strong opponent. We were able to convert our chances, although we could have scored more. Strogino always plays hard, the players attack with long passes, but we were ready for this, we worked on it in training. That's why we were able to win.

The start of the season turned out to be quite good, we will score more in the next matches.

But even with this result, the Dynamo team was unable to top the standings in Group D after the first round. It's all about the team that we will meet in Novogorsk in the next round.

The opponent of the blue and white in the 2nd round is the youth team of the ZhFK Zenit - the undisputed favorite of Group D and one of the main contenders for winning the championship.

Unlike the main blue-white-blue team, the youth team from St. Petersburg cannot yet boast of trophies. Although it was as close as possible to its first title last season, when throughout the year it smashed everyone and everything and until the last rounds of the final stage 1-8 of the Youth League it was in first place in the standings.

But - Alexey Tarasyuk's team lost first to Lokomotiv (1:2) at home, and then in the very last match of the season they lost away to ZhFK CSKA (0:2) and, having scored the same number of points, wins - draws - losses (10 - 2 - 2), surpassing the army team in goal difference (+ 50 for Zenit versus +42 for CSKA), Zenit lost gold to CSKA in personal meetings: in the first meeting the teams played 2:2... That’s how the St. Petersburg team played at the very last moment missed out on their first youth championship gold medals in history.

In the off-season, the team from the banks of the Neva, like many young teams in the league, was updated - first of all, the changes affected the coaching staff of the Zenit youth team. Alexey Tarasyuk was replaced by Roman Levendeev. The 32-year-old native of St. Petersburg and a graduate of St. Petersburg football played for teams in the lower leagues, as well as the beach side Crystal. After the early end of his playing career, Levendeev immediately began coaching: he worked as a coach in the branch of the Zenit Football Academy and FC Kirovets (2020-2022), as a coach and methodologist in the Akron-Academy Y. Konopleva team (Togliatti, 2022). Since November 2022, he began to combine work as an assistant coach of the Russian junior women's team U-16 and coach of the teams of FC Almaz-Antey (St. Petersburg): in 2023, he worked with the youth team and the team born in 2009.

The young St. Petersburg players, under the leadership of the new head coach, are approaching the meeting with Dynamo with a fantastic result: after the 1st round, Zenit has a goal difference of 10-0! Yes, yes, it was with this score that the blue-white-blues defeated the Youth League debutant ZhFK Sochi at home in the opening match. Moreover, 6 of these 10 goals were scored by young football players from St. Petersburg in the first half. The heroes of that meeting were striker Alexandra Aleshina, who scored 4 goals against the team, as well as defender and captain of the Zenit youth team Olga Posokhina, who scored a double.

And just a week ago, just before the start of the season, midfielder Daria Kotlova joined the team. The 15-year-old football player of the Russian U-17 junior team spent the previous season in the UFL girls for Lokomotiv U-16 and became the second top scorer in the league: she scored 24 goals in 17 matches.

As for the history of the confrontation between the youth teams of Dynamo and Zenit, they played 4 head-to-head meetings and so far the advantage is on the side of the St. Petersburg team, which won 3 victories (2:0, 4:0, 1:0), Dynamo has - so far one victory (3:2), won in the 2022 season, the goal difference is 3-9. An important point: Dynamo lost two matches last season with a “dry” score – 0:4 and 0:1, that is, the goal of the St. Petersburg team was never conquered by the blue and white team last year. Well, considering that the teams scored 14 goals between them in the opening round, we can assume that the opponents will not leave each other without goals in a head-to-head meeting.

The new meeting between the two teams will be served by a refereeing team led by Kristina Varyanitsa (Sochi), who will be assisted by assistant referees Elena Polikarpova (Tambov) and Anna Fedina (Moscow). Al Osta Mona from Moscow was appointed reserve referee, Irina Filimonova (Tomsk) will be the match inspector.

Kristina Varianitsa did not work at Dynamo games as a chief referee, only as an assistant referee and reserve referee.