The match this afternoon was a huge success on and off the field. The very beginning of the match was a little bit tentative from both teams and by the time Heikki Wilen’s shot from distance hit the cross bar at about 10 minutes into the match, I started to get flashbacks from the TaPa match, where we dominated large portions of the match, but failed to score the winning goal.

But boy was I wrong. Not much more than 5 minutes later the match was already 2-0 by goals from Niemelä and Omerovic, and in the end we got to celebrate an amazing 12-0 (5-0) victory. Omerovic went on to score a comfortable hat trick, Gbehan scored very important 4-0 and 5-0 goals that made sure that the second half was just a formality, and Dedic also scored a brace with the equally important 3-0 and 6-0 goals. Other goals were scored by Lahtinen, Karikuss, Lakra, and Ahola. Not surprisingly, I’m not feeling very analytical right now, so I will leave further commentary of the match to another blog post. Suffice to say now that the whole team played very well, and I’m very proud of the performance.

After the TaPa match I wrote in the match report that ”I expect that next week we will see a highly motivated TamU-K team that wants to make [the first victory] a reality.” That was not the most difficult prediction that I’ve ever got right in football, but being right has not often felt as good as today.

In the stands Sinikaarti was in great form, and in addition there were again a group of other Tampere United fans. There are two stands in Kaukajärvi for spectators, and it seems to work very well for us that Sinikaarti takes one of them and the other fans take the other one. Sinikaarti already has overflow around the stand, and hopefully that will be the case for the other ones too as the season goes on, word gets out, and the weather gets warmer.