Looks like the club has announced more confirmed fixtures in Kutonen. You can see the full list in the fixtures page on this site. This covers the first half of the season, where we meet each team in our subdivision once either home or away. After that there’s going to be a break of about three weeks in July, after which in the second half we play each team again, with home and away designations reversed obviously.

In case you are wondering about the long break, July is the traditional holiday month in Finland, and I’m sure some teams would have trouble fielding teams of 11 men at that time. I don’t think TamU-K would be one of those though, and in fact I’ve heard that we may be playing some matches in Piiricup during that time. This is a cup competition that is open to teams in divisions four to seven (Kolmonen to Kutonen) in the Tampere District of the Finnish FA. The final will be played on August 18 in Ratina Stadium, the stadium where Tampere United used to play in recent years. A return there would be quite emotional. I’m not sure how big our chances are to get there, because I do not even know how many of the better teams will participate in this competition, but in football there is always a chance and a supporter can always dream.

Anyway, back to the Kutonen schedule, it is great that all home matches are played in the same place, because that gives a sense of home field. The fact that it is Kaukajärvi is especially nice for me, because that is the area of Tampere where I grew up. It is a suburb field with a plastic pitch and there is no stadium there, but at least there should be bleacher style stands that we can stand on.

From a supporter’s point of view it is great to see that most matches are on a weekend, Friday and Saturday evening matches of course being the best ones. Our longest away trip falls on a Sunday when we meet Nokian Palloseura (NoPS) in Siuro about 30 kilometers from Tampere city center. Maybe we can make a detour to make the bus trip last longer than 30 minutes. This is actually going to be an amazing weekend for the supporters, because there is a home match against NePa Talent on Friday that same weekend. I hope that the team will handle two matches in three days well too. At least we have a large pool of players, so I think we are going to be just fine.

Another thing I want to point out from the schedule is that we meet AC Darra on a Sunday. I hope the away team lives up to their name: darra means hangover. Too bad kick-off isn’t earlier in the morning!