Nordic Football News

The Weekly is a little bit grumpy today because just when it was on the verge of scoring a new record of how many staples it can shoots inside a litter basket with a staple-gun inside sixty seconds, it was distracted by a volley of incoming transfer news that had been close to non-existent for the best part of a week. So in order for the Weekly to get to pursue his dreams of Olympic representation after staple-gun shooting is made an Olympic sport, lets skim the transfers quickly.

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In the second part of our look at some of the photos from 2009 in Finland, we focus on the fans. Click photos to enlarge.

TamU fans protest at the Ratina ground staff. Photo by Petteri Lehtonen.

One of the themes of Tampere football has been the struggle by supporters to get decent facilities in which to play and watch the game. The Veikkausliiga season was slated to start on 18 April, but the Ratina pitch had not yet been uncovered, or warmed via the heating system underneath it, and so the game was postponed until the grass could be left uncovered overnight.

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This is the first in a series of posts that will aim to tell something about Finland’s 2009 season using photgraphs. The pictures should form a gallery, when you click on one of them, but the text is not visible in those galleries. Thanks to Tero Wester, Petteri Lehtonen and FutisForum2 for all their help this year.

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Last week Kongsvinger beat Sarpsborg 08 in the playoffs to secure their place in the 2009 Tippeliga. The newcomers have been hailed as the first “low cost” Tippeliga-side and will no doubt be heavily tipped to go straight back down again next season, but then again so was Sandefjord..

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In the end, it wasn’t even a contest. Sauli Niinistö was elected chairman of the Finnish Football Association without opposition after Göran Enckelman’s supporters failed to nominate him at the FA congress in Kouvola.

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The Veikkausliiga season ended a few weeks ago but that is no reason for anyone to think there is no footballing life in the darkness of the cold Finnish winter. So rather than starting to watch ice-hockey, keep up to date with the goings-on in Finnish football with NFN’s Transfer Weekly. We’ll provide you with the hard facts, the unreliable gossip and the blatant lies connected with Veikkausliiga.

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As every journalist in Norway knows by now: Stick a microphone in front of Aalesund-manager Kjetil Rekdal and he’ll give you a story. The outspoken manager is rarely in the mood for platitudes, and after guiding his team to an unexpected cup-triumph he has been in a rich vein of quote-producing form, even by his considerable standards..

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The quarter finas were crazy and the semis were stirring, and after a nervy and turgid first half the final of the Norwegian cup exploded and more than lived up to it’s billing..

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NFN were at Ullevaal to follow the final of the Norwegian cup live, read on to find out how that went..

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When it all comes down to it, football is about putting the ball in the back of the net. And as Fredrikstad’s strikers spurned chance after chance, one of their former frontmen produced two neat finishes and sent last season’s runners-up in the Tippeliga crashing into Adeccoliga-obscurity. FFK-manager Tom Nordlie will no doubt have been thrilled to note that the club he left to save Fredrikstad, Kongsvinger, casually climbed their first hirdle with a 3-1 win over Sogndal.

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I went to Estonia last week to see a couple of Baltic League games. The competition is an interesting experiment, aimed at providing a higher level of competition for the top clubs in each league. After the failure of the Royal League, is it time Nordic clubs started looking in a similar direction, as an attempt to bridge the gap between mediocre domestic leagues and European competition? Here’s a short piece I did for the Helsinki Times on the competition:

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They’ve tried so hard and gotten so far, but in the end will it even matter?

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The last couple of rounds of the Tippeliga may have been underwhelming, but the good news is that this Sunday’s cup final between local rivals Molde and Aalesund is guaranteed to be a cracker. And even better, NFN will cover it in our own unmistakable style – with a live-blog to end all live-blogs.

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Very poorly scripted indeed, the endgame of the Tippeliga generated less excitement than the NFN editorial staff at a disco.

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Inter Turku won an enthralling Finnish Cup final at Töölö Football Stadium today, beating their erstwhile bogey team Tampere United 2-1.

TamU had gone ahead through Jonne Hjelm in the 11th minute, after the 21 year old striker picked up Kangaskolkka’s flick-on when Ari Nyman made a mess of his attempted clearance. Hjelm raced onto the loose ball and calmly slotted the ball into the bottom corner, giving goalkeeper David Monsalve little chance.

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Lyn and Bodø/Glimt are leaving together, but still it’s farewell. And maybe they’ll come back to earth, who can tell? To be honest there are quite a few people to blame. They have no ground. Hopefully things won’t ever be the same again. Did that get your attention? Good, because there’s is bugger all else about this round to get excited about, so there’s every chance this last Tippeliga-preview of 2009 will be even dafter than usual..

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