The Kutonen season is now at the half-way point, and it is time to analyze the past and make some predictions for the second half of the season. TamU-K has now played one match against each opponent, and in the second half we’ll play them again in the same order, naturally with the home and away designations reversed.

At the break TamU-K is third in the standings, eight points behind the number one team Pelikassit and one point behind Ikurin Vire. Since we have to finish in the top two to have a shot at promotion, it is fair to say that we are slightly behind our goal. However, everything is still in our own hands, because by winning all of the remaining matches (including the one against Ikurin Vire) we will get promoted. The way it works is that the second place team goes into a promotion playoff against second place teams from other subdivisions, and for us winning two matches against two different teams would result in promotion. Our fate is still in our own hands, and that is a good place to be. If we take care of business, we wont even have to look at what Vire are doing.

Winning our subdivision would give us direct promotion, which obviously would be hugely preferred. Pelikassit have so far won all of their matches, and with an eight point gap between us and them, we will need help from others if we want to catch them. Many have probably already given up the idea of reaching direct promotion, but it is not at all certain that Pelikassit will be able to keep winning in the fall season, especially as rumors are floating around about certain players being unavailable after the summer.

The gap between us and the fourth place team NePa Talent is four points. Behind them there are TaPa 2 and and YlöR /2, five and six points behind us, respectively. These are all second teams of their respective clubs, and as such can always be dangerous. However, it seems that if we have to worry about any of these teams catching us, then we no longer need to discuss our promotion chances. However, matches against any of these teams are potentially very difficult ones. Likewise, even though we wiped the plastic with PiPo-79 when we played them in the second match of the Kutonen season, they do have a few very strong players and cannot be underestimated. That’s assuming that they even get 11 men in the team when they play us, something that they did not manage in all matches in the spring.

The dark horse in the fall season is AC Darra. They were one of the best teams we faced in the spring season, yet mysteriously after eight matches they have just six points. It is notable that they lost by just one goal against Pelikassit, TamU-K, TaPa 2, YlöR /2 and indeed have a goal differential of just -3. My prediction is that in the fall season they will play a role in the promotion race by stealing points from some of the top three teams.

The only team that is clearly a class below everybody else is NoPS 3. There’s a lot of experience in the team, but a lot of it is about a decade as well as 30-40 pounds too much. They can be dangerous in set plays, but when you force them to run, chances are they wont. The expectation is that they will not have an effect on the promotion race and will remain at zero points.

The area where TamU-K needs to improve the most is defense. We still let too many easy goals to be scored against us. The statistics show this: we have given 18 goals in Kutonen as opposed to 9 and 12 of our main opponents. On the other hand, with 39 goals we are the highest scoring team in the table. An interesting fact is that in all matches that we have won we scored at least four goals, and also four goals would have been enough to win all matches that we did not win. We know that we win when we score a lot, but we cannot rely on just that to win all matches.

This is the table after each team has played once against each other team: