Matchday 15 Review: Akinfeev landmarks, Dzyuba hattrick, Agalarov limelight

We have looked back over the matchday 15 fixtures in the Russian Premier liga to bring you the best stats and figures.

1 - Krasnodar welcomed a wounded beast in Spartak Moscow at the weekend, and the battle lived up to its billing in a powerful display. Jhon Cordoba had endured a troubled run of his own, but was in the perfect place at the perfect time to tap in the opening goal, and in doing so register his first goal in seven matches.

3 - The pivotal moment of Akhmat’s surprise win away to Lokomotiv was undoubtedly the sending off of Murilo Cerqueira, and Akhmat’s goal from the resulting free kick. Daniil Utkin stepped up to deliver the killer blow, making it his third free kick scored this season. He has now scored more set-piece goals than anyone else in the league, as well as the most from outside the penalty area (4).

4 - Aleksey Kozlov has been a rare bright spark in Nizhny Novgorod’s season, and a shock top scorer for his club after bagging his fourth goal of the campaign against Zenit. Not only is he his club’s top marksman, he is also the highest-scoring defender in the RPL so far, and has already beaten his previous best season as a scorer.

4 - Dynamo were in utterly devastating form as they stormed past Arsenal Tula, with Vyacheslav Grulev baggin two of their first four goals in a 5-1 romp. Grulev himself has now scored five goals in his last four appearances - one more than in his first 25 RPL appearances - while this match itself was the first time Dynamo had scored four goals in the first half of an RPL match since 2014.

5 - As the all-time top scorer in the history of the Russian Premier Liga, goals are second nature to Artem Dzyuba, but he managed to set yet another record after masterminding Zenit’s destruction of Nizhny Novgorod. His hattrick was his fifth in the competition’s history, more than any other player. Four of those have come in the last two and a half years.

5 - Remy Cabella was an electric spark for Krasnodar in their 2-1 win over Spartak, as he has been on many occasions this season. The Frenchman was very unselfish in squaring to Jhon Cordoba for his opening goal to take him to five assists for the season, making him the joint-highest assist-provider in the RPL alongside Arsen Zakharyan.

13 - If Artem Dzyuba is the master goalscorer, the hungry apprentice is without question Gamid Agalarov. The Ufa striker bagged both goals to earn his side a creditable draw away to Rostov, keeping him top of the RPL scoring charts on 13 goals. Not only does he keep outdoing himself in his overall tally, but the proportion of his team’s goals is remarkable; after half the season, he has scored 80% of all Ufa goals.

56 - Oliver Abildgaard had quite an eventual match down in Sochi. The Danish midfielder saw red in the second half, but not before he had struck an absolute beauty of an equaliser, curling a first-time effort into the bottom corner as if he’d been scoring all his life. In fact, it was his first goal in 52 RPL appearances from 56 shots taken. 

500 - There is absolutely no question that Igor Akinfeev is a legend of Russian football. Since saving a penalty on his debut as a precocious 17-year-old against Krylia Sovetov over half his lifetime ago, he has saved CSKA countless results, including this weekend with his usual shot-stopping brilliance. It was a phenomenal landmark he reached too - 500 appearances in the RPL. As fate would have it, the game also marked his 800th for CSKA Moscow.

Photo: Anna Meyer / Zenit St. Petersburg