The aftermath of Saturday’s PP-70 match has certainly been an emotional one. Just like earlier this season in the away leg at Ikuri, we played a bad match against PP-70. At this point of the season we are supposed to reach our peak form so that we’ll have a chance to win the promotion match, but now it is by no means certain that we will even play in that match. We still have everything in our own hands, and our quality should prevail in the remaining matches home against LeKi-futis and away at Tervakosken Pato. But in order to do that, we should show many more signs of that quality than we did on Saturday.

Specifically, if NePa wins their match away at VaKP on Friday, we will need four points from our remaining two matches. If they play a draw or VaKP wins, we will need two points from those matches. These are all based on the assumption that our better goal differential holds, which is all but certain as we have +29 right now, whereas NePa has +21 and VaKP has +8. Regardless, we have very little room for error at this point.

Our goalie situation took an interesting turn, as Kalle Heltonen got injured on Thursday in team training. Apparently he will be out for the rest of the season. On Saturday we had our second team goalie Ari-Pekka Puputti on goal on an emergency call. For the rest of the season Ilkka Innola is also an option, depending on his work schedules and his ability to find babysitters. As of now, there is no announcement on who will be on goal on Sunday for our match against LeKi-futis.

Getting back to the PP-70 match, it is sufficient to say that we deserved to lose it. The way we played during the first half, it was apparent at halftime what the result was going to be. To the team’s credit, the second half looked a little better and when Andrea Milanti scored the equalizer that he had earned himself, I thought for a moment that we’d have a chance. Towards the end I was just hoping for a tie, because even getting that one point would have been very helpful for us. It wasn’t to be, with a bit of bad luck in PP-70’s equalizer, where Puputti got his fingertips on the ball, put ultimately it bounced via the goalpost and his back to the other side of the goalmouth, where the goal was scored via a touch from the other post.

Now it is time to proudly look forward. The latter part of the season has not been quite what we hoped for in the summer, but we still have promotion in our own hands, and enough quality in the team to win the big matches. In less two weeks we will know if we get to play the biggest one!

TamU-K – PP-70 1-2 (0-1)
35 min Tero Pohjolainen 0-1
65 min Andrea Milanti 1-1 (rp)
82 min Muha Al-Itawa 1-2

Discipline:
42 min Mikael Peltonen, PP-70 (caution)
63 min Jussi Siltanen, PP-70 (caution)
70 min Jussi Näppilä, PP-70 (caution)
84 min Jan Irjala, TamU-K (caution)
90 min Vesa Suonsyrjä, TamU-K (ejection)