The blog has been on hiatus for a while, and therefore many recent events have gone without comment. That might have been a good thing in some ways, because the cancellation of the away match against Blue Eyes Team in Jyväskylä ten days ago would have been difficult to write about at the time. Since then I have learned that many unfortunate

factors contributed to the fact that we had to forfeit the match on the morning of the match, and I’m quite certain nothing like this will happen ever again. It was certainly a learning experience for many of the people involved.

On Friday night TamU-K played a training match against FC Rauma. The venue was Äijänsuo Stadium in Rauma, a proper football stadium with a heated artificial turf. Everything was set up for a great away day, and all the way to the 70th minute everything looked that way. Then something weird happened and a comfortable 0-2 lead thawed into a disappointing 2-2 draw against a far inferior team.

A couple important things have happened since my last blog post. On Saturday we played a training match against PP-70, and after a roller-coaster of events ended up in a 4-4 draw. On Monday the club announced the 24th signing for the 2013 season. With full back Antti Eijamo now officially included in the team, it seems that the team-building phase of the offseason is over, and from now on it will be all about getting ready for the start of the competitive season in late April or early May.

On Sunday night TamU-K played a training match against Tampereen Palloilijat or TaPa for short. It wasn’t a great performance from either team, but we showed again that it is very hard to score on us, and this time it was good for a 2-1 victory. Our goals were scored by a TaPa defender about 25 minutes into the first half, and by Mika Kytöviita at about the 87th minute.

On Monday the club released two new t-shirts that are now on presale in the online store here on the website. Many things have been said about them, and one is that these are two of the best looking Tampere United items that have ever been available. That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but nevertheless it is evident that a club owned by supporters has a very good handle on what the supporters want.

I was planning to write a match preview for the second round Finnish Cup fixture against Valkeakosken Koskenpojat (VaKP), but never had the time to finish it in time. I only had the first paragraph ready before kickoff so I never published it. What I had written was that TamU-K was in for one of its biggest tests yet, and that it was clear that in order to even stand a chance against VaKP we were going to need a much better performance than the one against Ikurin Vire a week earlier in the first round match.

On Sunday TamU-K traveled to Pori with a core group of about fifteen supporters. For a lot many players who have not received a lot of playing time in previous matches this season today’s match was an important opportunity to impress the coaching staff. However, for the supporters this was a no-pressure away trip, because everybody expected the victory to be pretty easy, and even if that wasn’t going to be the case, it was just a training match whose result didn’t really matter. As such, the atmosphere on the bus was very chill there and back. In between we saw TamU-K cruise to a relatively easy 1-3 (1-1) away victory over Porin Palloilijat.

This season there will be 24 teams competing in Vitonen in the Tampere District. Just over one hour ago the highly anticipated allocation of teams into two subdivisions came out. TamU-K will play in the more southern subdivision, and the consensus around the Internet seems to be that we got the easier subdivision. However, the beginning of February is probably way too early to make such assessment, and for a supporter the more interesting question right now is what our away trip destinations are going to be.

The Finnish Cup first round match against Ikurin Vire turned out to be just as easy as it should have been. The whole match it was clear that TamU-K was the far better team on the field. In fact, the opponent only got one real chance at scoring, and at that point the match was already 3-0, which was also the final score. That chance was denied by a big save from Ilkka Innola. The only real complaint would be that the match was allowed to go to the half at just 1-0, player-coach Mika Suonsyrjä having scored the one goal on the 5th minute. We should have put this one to bed even earlier than we did.

Our competitive season begins just about four months after the end of last season, which is much sooner than many might have thought. The 2013 season marks the fourth time that the Finnish Cup begins in the dead of the winter for lower league clubs. Starting the national cup competition this time of the year seems very weird, but at the same time getting back to competitive matches is very exciting of course.