Dodging a bullet: Finland 1 Armenia 0

Oh well, it's the points that count, I suppose

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By William Moore
     
      First, the good news. Finland beat Armenia 1-0 in an almost-full Finnair Stadium on Wednesday evening, and regardless of the outcome of the other two games in Qualifying Group A of the 2008 UEFA European Championships, Finland will head the group table over the winter recess.
      Some more good news: Finland have a world-class goalkeeper. Without the timely intervention of Bolton's Jussi Jääskeläinen on at least three occasions, the headline at the top of this piece would have been somewhat different, and there would probably only have been bad news to report.
      In part thanks to the estimable Mr. Jääskeläinen's efforts, there is also the good news that Finnish crowds now know rather better how to sing - rather than simply yelling "Suomi, Suomi" with rythmical clapping accompaniment. The crowd on Wednesday night did their best. Would that the team had matched them in intensity and strength of purpose.
     
And so to the bad news. To put it kindly, this was a pretty lacklustre performance, even for an injury-hit side.
      If it were not for the incontrovertible fact that Finland have eleven points and Armenia have just the one, it would have been very hard to tell these two teams apart. For lengthy periods of the second half at least, the Armenians looked like the contenders for group leadership while the Finns looked, well, the word "shambolic" comes to mind.
      After the first ten minutes, in which Mika Nurmela's head got the final touch to a move that was started by a fierce parried shot from Mika Väyrynen and then laid back off the rebound by Jonatan Johansson, there was precious little for the 9,400 fans to get excited about.
     
The Finnish midfield was shapeless, and most attacks (with the notable exception of the one that led to the goal) doggedly went down the right. Few passes inside the final third of the field found home - even on an artificial turf pitch that was light-years better than that for the 0-0 draw at the reverse fixture in Yerevan last month - and the absence of a player with vision was palpable.
      Jari Litmanen may be in the twilight of his career, and he may have lost more than the proverbial "yard of pace", but he still has enough footballing nouse between his ears to run rings around the sort of opposition Finland faced on Wednesday.
      His replacement (Litmanen was regrettably again unavailable through injury) Alexei Eremenko Jr. has a great deal of skill on the ball, he has been achieving great things for FC Saturn in Moscow, and he may yet develop into an international player of real stature, but he did little last night to suggest he has the wherewithal to step into Litmanen's shoes just yet.
      All too often, he charged forwards in route-one style, tried to take on two or three defenders, and then hit a pass that would have had multi-million-euro stars struggling to connect with it. It was all made so very difficult, when the recipe was to "keep it simple, stupid".
     
This was the problem of the first half, after the 8th minute goal.
      Finland kept a lid on things, and didn't really look like conceding a goal, but then again they hardly looked like scoring again either, because they never held the ball up long enough in midfield to get anyone into a decent scoring position. Haste makes waste.
     
If the first half was a chapter of missed opportunities to create opportunities to score, the second half was even worse. Whatever the Finns' British-born coach Roy Hodgson said to them at the interval, they lost the plot.
      By sixty minutes the Armenians had gained enough in self-confidence that they actually posed a greater threat than their hosts.
      Two of the three aforementioned timely interventions by Jussi Jääskeläinen came in the second period. Once he smothered a shot from Levon Pachajyan after the Armenian had nutmegged Toni Kallio on the right-hand edge of the box, and then five minutes from time he produced a brilliant reflex stop after Pachajyan set up substitute Aram Hakobyan with the goal at his mercy.
      Karen Dokhoyan also brought out the best in the Finnish keeper after only five minutes with a flighted header from distance that Jääskeläinen did well to steer past the post for a corner.
     
The very fact that so much has been written about Jussi Jääskeläinen and the three Armenian efforts should indicate that the visitors ultimately came closer to grabbing a share of the points than Finland did to getting a second goal to kill off the contest.
      In fairness, the disjointed and at time hapless work of the Finns in the second half was partly caused by the loss of Mika Väyrynen at half-time. He picked up a knock on his thigh just before the interval and was replaced by Jari Ilola.
      The defence was for the most part solid, although the infection of giving the ball away when it was least helpful seemed to be spreading down to the basement as the final whistle approached.
     
But I suppose in the end all that the record-books will show is that Finland won, that they collected three valuable points, and that they are heading the group table for the next four months. Few will bother to reflect on the way in which the result was achieved - especially if these points make a difference when it comes to qualification from Group A.
      However, there's the rub. Any half-decent, organised side would have cut through Armenia like a hot knife through butter, especially after grabbing an early nerve-settling goal, and Finland will have to play much better outfits than this and still keep winning if they wish to go to Euro 2008 in Austria and Switzerland.
      On the strength of this performance at least, that will be a very tall order.
     
The returns to duty of a fit Litmanen, a Mikael Forssell who has rediscovered a taste for scoring goals, the hard-working Teemu Tainio and Aki Riihilahti in midfield, and also the contribution of Petri Pasanen at right-back are devoutly to be wished when things get going again next March.
      The first four were already ruled out of last night's encounter, and Pasanen apparently picked up a last-minute ankle problem. A small footballing country like Finland does not have the depth of players to cope with a long injury list, as Roy Hodgson's predecessors know only too well.
     
Finally, a bit more (relatively) good news. Poland defeated Belgium in Brussels by the only goal. Since the Finns have already disposed of Poland 3-1 away, this result indirectly helped to blunt the Belgian threat to Finnish hopes of qualifying, even though a draw would have possibly been the optimum outcome for us.
      The Poles are clearly an improving force - they beat Portugal at home last month - so it is nice to have got that difficult away fixture out of the way successfully.
      Although naturally anything can happen before November 2007, the smart money would probably suggest that World Cup semi-finalists Portugal will qualify from Group A, leaving the second available place to be scrapped over by Poland, Belgiúm, Serbia, and Finland.
      Finland next travel to Azerbaijan in March 2007 for another awkward long-distance away game, and then they host Serbia and Belgium in quick succession at the beginning of June. All three games will be critical, and will ask a lot more of the Finns than we saw them give on Wednesday.
      Finland's experienced coach Roy Hodgson has stated earlier that he is confident there will be setbacks for the more fancied teams in the large group, with the minnows stealing points here and there and complicating matters.
      In that sense, Finland dodged a bullet against Armenia. But only just.
     
      Finland:
      Jussi Jääskeläinen
      Toni Kallio
      Sami Hyypiä (captain)
      Hannu Tihinen
      Ari Nyman
      Joonas Kolkka
      Markus Heikkinen
      Mika Väyrynen (46. Jari Ilola)
      Mika Nurmela
      Aleksei Eremenko jr (88. Shefki Kuqi)
      Jonatan Johansson
     
      Head Coach: Roy Hodgson
     
      Referee: Craig Thomson (Scotland)
      Attendance: 9,445 (capacity 10,770)
      Weather: Chilly (+3°C) but dry.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  The dream lives on: Kazakhstan 0 Finland 2 (12.10.2006)
  Two points dropped: Armenia 0 Finland 0 (9.10.2006)

Links:
  UEFA Report
  UEFA Group A Table
  Finnair Stadium (Wikipedia)

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