Today is an important day in the off-season: the first team plays the last training match. The opponent is a team built from a core of their U21 team reinforced with several adult players. It should be a much better opponent for us than the pitiful Ilves team that we beat a week ago. You may be able to check it out for yourself as the club is attempting to stream it live at tamu-k.com/live. It is an equipment test really, but if all goes well, you may be able to watch the whole match.

After today we will start with competitive matches. Amazingly the schedule for our Nelonen season is still not ready, and we do not know when and where any of our home matches are played. In fact, this is true for all clubs based in Tampere. The short answer to the question why is “lack of fields”. That is a topic I’ve covered on this blog a few times before, so I’ll skip it this time.

The one big announcement this past week was the date of our Finnish Regions’ Cup fixture away at Seinäjoki against Sisu-Pallo. Form a supporter point of view it could not be much better: Saturday April 12th at 3:00 pm. That is going to be a great kick-off for our season!

We are entering the season with a bit of uncertainty around the team. Everybody knows that we have built a good group of players, but unfortunately we have not had anything resembling our ideal starting eleven in many matches this winter. It has not been a question of commitment, but rather an unusual number of injuries and illnesses. Today is quite different though. The starting lineup is the strongest in our club’s history, and the same is true about the bench. That’s at least on paper. Today we shall see how we are able to translate that into reality. It is of course far from the be all and end all of our season, but a good performance today would go a long way in helping us get the season to a positive start.

Today though, I expect to see domination in the offensive third and a few nice goals. For the first time in the off season we will have the trio Milanti-Vadén-Riikonen on the field at the same time. Add Jacin Dakkaki playing on top of them, and it is a formidable offensive force. Below them are Juha Kumara and Niko Saarinen, who seem to have a great partnership. The defensive line is Pitkänen-Irjala-Kauppinen-Toiva, also our elite. Ville Toiva of course is not under contract with us yet, but I hear rumors that this may not be the case for too long. And finally, Ilkka Innola is in goal today.