Spring is the best time of the year for Finnish football supporters. First the long-awaited schedules come out, and then the real matches finally begin. This year we had to wait for an unusually long time until we knew when our matches would be played, but when things started happening, they happened fast. See the full schedules at tamu-k.com/english/fixtures.

First the great news: all but one of the home matches of the first team will be played at our preferred stadium at Pyynikki. It has truly become a home for all the supporters, and even if the field is small and the surface is not the best artificial turf in town, even the players seem to enjoy playing at a real stadium in front of big crowds. Also, all of our home matches will be played on Saturdays and Sundays, which is the kind of consistency we could only hope for in our previous seasons. Most of them even start at the same convenient time at 4 pm in the late afternoon.

The only home match not in Pyynikki will be played in Kaukajärvi, which is a field we are very familiar with as a club. That match is going to be against FC Melody in early July. Without saying anything more, I’ll just leave with saying that there’s something quite fitting in playing this match on a field without a stadium.

There are of course a few quirks in the schedule, but that is still to be expected on this level. No home matches between June 1 and July 5 is a little weird, but that might be just for the better as Pyynikki is quite busy with American Football that time of the year, and we might have had to play somewhere else. And of course this stretch of away matches was approved by the club, when PP-70 wanted to switch our home-and-away designations. So no real worries there, just a little weird to not have an opportunity to buy a TamU-K sausage for more than a month.

The other quirk occurs at the turn of July into August, when we play away at Kaukajärvi against NePa on the 31st and then host VaKP just two days later on the 2nd. This is not the first time we’ve had a sequence like this, but ideally these could be avoided.

We are also starting to get schedules for our other teams. The second team has the first half of the schedule out (tamu-k.com/tamu-k-2/ottelut in Finnish) and the same is true for our U17 boys as well (tamu-k.com/b-pojat/ottelut in Finnish). It turns out that the weekend after Easter will be SUPER weekend for us. On Friday the 25th we will have TamU-K Support Night at Klubi, on Saturday the 26th the first team will have their home opener against UrPS, on Sunday the 27th the second team will have their season opener against Roxbury JK, and on Monday the 28th our U17 boys will open their season with a match against PJK.

Who’s going to be able to handle all that?