Today the club announced that the

third round Finnish Regions’ Cup match against LeKi-futis will be played on the upcoming Saturday at 4 pm sharp in place of the league fixture against TaPa. A new date for the TaPa match was not yet announced, but it will probably go deep into the summer.

Since TamU-K has matches almost exclusively on weekends, a person not in the know about the situation in Tampere might think it should be easy to find a date for an additional cup match. Unfortunately such is not the case here. Clubs in Tampere suffer from a severe lack of fields, and springtime is the worst because fields with real grass are not yet open, and the demand for fields with artificial turf exceeds supply by an even larger margin than other times of the year. There has been little progress with the field situation in Tampere in recent years, which is a real shame for a city of this size.

As I’m told, there was no available time on any of the artificial turfs in Tampere on any weekday. The only available option was to play on a weekend, which required rescheduling one of our matches to a later date. As such this is not a huge deal, but it is symptomatic of a much bigger problem in Tampere, a problem that causes difficulties for all clubs based in the city.

Personally I was a bit surprised that the need to find a field for a match in a national cup competition does not allow bumping a practice session of another team. On the other hand, looking from the point of view of the team whose practice session would be canceled, I can see why this is not done. Still, the current situation makes participating in cup competitions in Tampere very difficult, and it is not surprising that only 5 of the 37 eligible teams in the city decided to participate in Finnish Regions’ Cup this year. And that is a real shame.