Lokomotiv president defends transfer policy

Lokomotiv Moscow president Olga Smorodskaya has defended her club's transfer policy after the coach she recently fired, Jose Couceiro, blasted it as being dictated from above. The 49-year-old Portuguese coach is to be replaced by Croatia manager Slaven Bilic following Euro 2012 after Lokomotiv refused to prolong Couceiro's contract. Lokomotiv signed several players during his year at the club but Couceiro said in an interview with Sport-Express that the only one he had specifically asked for was Spanish midfielder Alberto Zapater, who joined on a free from Sporting Lisbon in August. "Selection activities are the prerogative of the club," Smorodskaya told R-Sport. "The club suggests (transfer targets) and the head coach agrees them," she said. Smorodskaya, who took over at Lokomotiv in 2010, said she hadn't read Couceiro's interview. Couceiro was the third coach to be fired by Smorodskaya, who took over as Lokomotiv president in July 2010. "The scouting service lived its own life, and it is wrong," he told Sport-Express. "This does not mean that all the other players who appeared in the team were bad. But I disagree fundamentally with such an attitude," he said. Couceiro joined in June from Sporting Lisbon and immediately took the team on a 12-game unbeaten league run. But he only managed three wins in the following 16 games, suffering five defeats and three draws in his last eight, and the team finished seventh in the Russian Premier League, out of European competition.