It always feels weird playing an away match at our home stadium in Pyynikki. Yesterday was made even weirder by the fact that we played against the local rival Ilves, but pretty much nobody cared about the home team. This was not surprising at all – but nevertheless it gave a really odd feeling to the whole event. Some called it a derby ahead of the match, but is it a derby when only one of the teams gets any support? In fact, even the overall attendance was significantly lower than just a few days earlier in our match against the nondescript FJK.

The 1-1 draw was of course a disappointing result. This was our first ever meeting with Ilves, and it would have been nice to put a victory in the history books. In the end we were fortunate to even get the one point. It was probably our worst performance this season, and when Ilves scored ten minutes into the second half, it felt like we had a huge mountain to climb. In the end it was our center backs who delivered the equalizer for us. Andrea Milanti’s long corner kick landed on Timo Kauppinen’s feet outside the box, and he found his CB buddy Jan Irjala inside the box for a tap in goal.

Our best player in this match was goalie Kalle Heltonen. He was excellent during the winter, and seems to be continuing in that same form, taking a few key saves. Apart from the goal that resulted from a bad clearance by Jan Irjala, most of our problems in the back resulted from free-kicks. Ilves was moving fast and a few of their young players were pretty skilful, but as is typical to teams consisting of mostly youth players, they were not very effective in the final third. That said, we lost the midfield battle, and thereby our chances to win the match were diminished by a huge factor.

As far as the table is concerned, we are still in a pretty good shape. It seems that all teams who are seen as maybe being able to fight for promotion are dropping points to teams they probably should be able to win. Indeed, LeKi-futis is the only team that has dropped fewer points than us at this point, but they have only played four matches. The counter-argument to all this of course is that we could have taken advantage of this situation and run a bit of a gap to the other teams. However, I’d like to focus on remaining optimistic.

Our next chance to induce more optimism into all Tampere United supporters is on Sunday, when we face TP-49. They are supposed to be one of the better teams, but today they drew Sastamalan Woima (SW) in a home match. SW actually lost their first four matches, but have since taken four points in two matches. I suppose that is another indicator of how evenly matched and unpredictable Nelonen is this year.

Ilves 2 – TamU-K 1-1 (0-0)
55 min 1-0 Amin Chouaib
68 min 1-1 Jan Irjala

Discipline:
37 min Timo Kauppinen, TamU-K (caution)
75 min Eero Riponiemi, TamU-K (caution)
81 min Jussi Harju, Ilves 2 (caution)