Pallohonka 1 Ilves 2

Wed, Jul 8, 2009

Ilves have been playing again for a season and a half now, and for the most part they’ve been up near the top of the Kakkonen group B table. Tampere photographer Petteri Lehtonen has been following them, and has kindly agreed to allow NFN to use his photos to bring a little bit of Kakkonen to our readers.

This level of football is not high, you understand. Like lower divisions everywhere, it is a combination of young talents on their way up, journeymen who’ve found their level, and established stars on their way down. Ilves have all three in their side, whereas Pallohonka are a more development-orientated team.

The reserve team of FC Honka have an extremely young side (Honka’s first team includes a couple of teenagers, so you can imagine how young the reserves are), and it shows. In Tampere earlier in the season they lost 3-2 to PP70 despite going 2-0 up, and they conceded a late winner against Ilves too. They try to play football on the floor, build from the back, and use their pace to counter-attack, but they’re not quite wily enough to succeed at this level yet.

That said, they’re not in the relegation zone either. While Ilves represent a club that had a fair few fans before it went bankrupt, and as such has a following that expects decent performances, Pallohonka are a purely developmental side and don’t have pressures outside the club’s own objectives. Ilves play their home games at Tammela, with a fair few beered-up Tamperelaiset yelling abuse at the opposition and occasionally their own players, whereas Pallohonka seem to play at a deserted ground.

It’s an interesting clash of styles. A lot of people think Finnish football doesn’t have enough competition, that everyone wins too much and it doesn’t harden people up, whereas I’m of the opposite opinion. Junior teams experience promotion and relegation twice a season here, giving coaches no leeway whatsoever to experiment and try to develop players rather than chase points and wins.

The competition that’s lacking is within clubs, where the hefty subs parents pay ensure that outside of a very few academy teams, paying players are welcome even when they don’t improve the team. Ilves have the biggest junior section in Finland, and almost by default produce a lot of players, but in the last ten years fewer have come through without a professional team to focus on.

Honka are one club that have combined a thriving academy set-up with a huge, subs-paying junior section, but I often wonder whether the two would be better separated.

Let Honka and Ilves concentrate on developing young pros, and let the Honka ‘Internazionale’, and Ilves ‘Liverpool’ (the non-academy teams tend to take on the names of famous European clubs) develop their own, separate identity. The best Espoo talent will still gravitate towards Honka, and the junior clubs might enjoy things more if they did their own thing in their own shirts.

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