Finland vs. San Marino

Edit: local tv commentators can not gather themselves!

Edit: FT 8-0. Justified I guess, but these kind of matches leave me a bit  cold. Jari Litmanen on the other hand never does, and as he came in at HT it was only 1-0. One unofficial match report in english here.

Edit: odds for Finland have been rising big time, and I like it! Finland -3.75 @ 1.98 thank you.


EDIT: starting lineup of Finland

1 Otto Fredrikson
2 Petri Pasanen
3 Niklas Moisander
5 Veli Lampi
6 Mika Väyrynen
7 Roman Eremenko
9 Mikael Forssell
15 Daniel Sjölund
20 Alexei Eremenko Jr
21 Kasper Hämäläinen
23 Markus Heikkinen


Tonight´s international top clash vs. San Marino (preview by San Marino reporter in Italian ) will be the last match of the season 2010 around here for me. Fortunately the pre-season for 2011 starts in December!

There is actually theoretical value in San Marino +3.75 @ 2.12 tonight, but bloody hell I am not taking it! A few words regarding the atmosphere in the Finnish squad tonight;

• the failed manager Stuart Baxter has been fired a few weeks ago. He is still in a consulting/insulting role in the team, but he is pretty much history by now.
• Olli Huttunen is the caretake-manager. He is, looks like and acts like an assistant manager and is on top of his career for today.
• Again, this might be another chance for a farewell game for Jari Litmanen, but he is good in keeping his thoughts to his own.
  
• There are no big changes in the squad, Huttunen decided not to include a few ( ok, only Perparim Hetemaj from Brescia) controversial players into the team who were partly to blame for sacking Baxter.
• The expectactions among the big audience are not too high, I guess San Marino is not the most of interesting of all teams. The ticket prices also were on a ridiculous level and the Olympic stadion will be some only some 20-25 % full of the capacity.
  

You can all see yourselves from the stats how the visitors have done, and admittedly since scoring a fast goal vs. England exactly 17 years ago they have not been that much on fire in front of the goal.

Hungary and Sweden demolished San Marino rather thoroughly recently and Finland do have good chances to do the same. There are players capable of - and hungry of - scoring a lot of goals. However as I do again have the luxury of watching this live from the home sofa and making up my mind later that is what I will do. I hope an opportunity rises for a nice bet, but if Finland has all the possession and the speed from the start it is rather unlikely as the pre-match odds for the favourite are very poor value.