Nordic Football News

I went to the press conference at the Finnish FA yesterday, and it was pretty interesting. This is the first chunk of transcript, much of which wasn’t reported in the Finnish press today. I’ll write up the rest – detailing the Belgium match and Lauri Dalla Valle – tonight or tomorrow. Apologies for the delay.

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One of the many loveable idiosyncrasies of Finnish football is the relaxed attitude to registrations taken by the authorities here. Players can switch clubs with bewildering regularity, via an intricate network of co-operation agreements between clubs at all levels of the game. Promising young defender Johannes Mononen has played for all three of Tampere’s top clubs this season, for instance, while remaining registered to Tampere United. One-game and two-game loans are possible, and can be utterly confusing for the casual observer.

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TPS will host Welsh side Port Talbot Town in their opening fixture of the UEFA Europa League first qualification round tie. Having recently played four games in nine days, TPS are having injury problems. In Wednesday’s pre-game press conference, head coach Marko Rajamäki revealed five players are ruled out of Thursday’s game.

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What does NFN do when some of the more exciting endings to matches happen in a round of the Tippeliga? That’s right, we mess it up and get a delayed report. Partially because of boring stuff like real jobs, and partially because this writer can be a lazy bastard. Oh well, you get what you pay for.

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The Finnish league has made it all the way to the 8th round, which makes us here at the NFN Ivory Tower quite ready and willing to single out some teams for harsh criticism. We could also carve out the positives out of some teams’ performances, but who wants to read good news anyway?

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The HJK that many have been waiting for finally showed up in the Finnish Cup victory over Honka last week. For once HJK had certainly done their tactical homework. During the defeat in Espoo three weeks ago, they could neither contain Honka’s flowing passing game nor find the keys to unlock the stubborn Honka defence. This time, however, HJK took the initiative from the word go, stifled the visitors’ midfield and pretty much passed Honka out of Finnair Stadium.

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Glenn’s going to be following Denmark in the World Cup, and here he has news of a recent friendly defeat:

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Finland’s friendly against Poland was televised live on Saturday evening. That is not such a common occurrence in Finland, as the media tends to rank football somewhere between tractor-pulling and volleyball in the list of broadcasting priorities. Helsingin Sanomat’s reporter at the game, Kristian Sundqvist, kindly gave NFN permission to translate his column from Sunday’s paper bemoaning this sorry state of affairs:

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NFN continues to be somewhat semi-accurate in match predictions, but we are certainly right on the money when it comes to capturing the -spirit- of this year’s Tippeliga. Almost every game this round had some neat gameplay happening, or somebody did something incredibly stupid. And that’s just what NFN said would happen! The result of this correctness, not to mention the combined entertainment of nice matches and stupid players,  gave us all a sarcastic orgasm, or a sorcasm. (more…)

Nic Townsend of Doing Goals examines Allsvenskan’s contribution to the World Cup.

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I’ve been thoroughly enjoying this football season. Pub Harald have expanded their beer-selling operations from Ilves to TPV matches, ensuring that pretty much every game taking place at Tammela can now be enjoyed with alcoholic enhancement. And Finnish football, much as I love it, does often need alcoholic enhancement.

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Still high on the schadenfreude endorphins that came from this week’s cup upsets, this NFN writer is graciously feeling that the Tippeliga is right where it belongs. When the players fail to create entertainment on the field, there are plenty of people who will gladly say stupid things to a camera in the hopes that the match will look better in comparison. Although it can sometimes make his job harder, seeing as it can be troublesome writing sarcastic comments about something that is so absurd that it provides its own irony without any help. Absurdity and weak excuses are -my- job, dammit! (more…)

The second round of the cup’s been played, and it contained a fair amount of action. Referee blunders, underdogs giving a good fight until nearly the end… But the fourteen Tippeliga teams that did manage to get through one way or another isn’t what everyone’s talking about.

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Before taking over the prediction part, I was told to maintain NFN’s rather low standards of accuracy, lest I get fired from this gig, and also get a good “high school swirling” going on*. Thankfully, I have proved to be just as incompetent as Lars Sivertsen, so here are your excuses for why I was wrong most of the time:

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It’s not just league football the Nordics play during the summer – some of them are even going to the World Cup! Glenn Dowd runs the rule over the squad going to South Africa to represent the good Queen Margrethe II, lots of angry cartoonists, and the world’s unfinished-sandwich producing community.

Denmark manager Morten Olsen has selected goalkeeper Thomas Sorensen for his provisional 26 man World Cup squad, even though he is still injured.

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OK, with Lars out of the picture, that leaves the door open for me gaining world domination… MOWAHAHAHA! Anyway, this preview’s a bit early because the Norwegian cup is also starting soon. (more…)