Skyrise

See, I told you that the sky wasn’t falling.  Quite the opposite.  Three wins on the trot and we’re sitting in a comfortable 3rd.

Since I last wrote, I’ve been up to a lot of fun stuff.  I went to London to visit Celia, I scored a goal, visited Helsinki and spent some time with my dad, who came over from America.  Before I get into that stuff though, I’ll talk briefly about the last few games.

We’ve taken 10 points from 4 games in September, and have gone up to 2nd in the form table behind only HJK.  For some reason that I simply can’t explain, we are simply better than just about everyone else in multiple game weeks.  Whenever we play 3 games in 7-8 days we always win the majority of them.  That said, we haven’t played particularly well this month, we’ve just gone back to winning ugly.  We drew with RoPS to start the month by scoring late after conceding a goal near the end.  Even though we only tied that game, I think it gave us confidence in our ability to grind out results again.  We used that confidence to hold on against JJK, KuPS and Inter.  On paper, those should have been easy wins based on the table, but for my money those are three of the better teams in this league.  JJK plays a style that gives us fits, but also leaves themselves open at the back.  KuPS is probably the 2nd most talented team in the league behind HJK, but they never seem to put it all together even when they win.  Inter is a team that would be really dangerous right now if they still cared, but they don’t and thus we were able to beat them.  I said a few months ago that we needed 5 wins from our last 11 games to get third and we now have 4 of them.  We need to win at least one more game this year and we have four tough opponents.  It won’t be easy, but for something so important I think our club can dig down and get the results we need.

As for off the field events, I’ve been uncharacteristically busy.  My month started out with a draw against RoPS, after which I hopped on a plane to London!  Unfortunately for me, the amount of time we had free only allowed me to spend 36 hours in the british capital, but it was still worth it to see Celia.  I took a few pictures and I’ll put them up sometime, but with this new computer I’m not really sure how to load photos from my phone to the blog since it all has to be done through “the cloud” and I’m not amazing with electronics [edit: done].  We didn’t do much anyway, but I did get to see her new place which was nice.  It’s in a totally different part of London from where she used to live to I was able to see parts of the city that I never visited before, including Wimbledon.

The trip back from London was an absolute nightmare.  Since I’m not made of money, I had to get the cheapest flight home possible.  That meant two Ryanair flights from London to Lithuania to Tampere with the Lithuania stopover being 5 hours (note: flying to Lithuania is something I would not recommend.  I’m sure Lithuania is great, but when Lithuanians are confined to a small space like, say, an airplane things get miserable).  The fun didn’t stop there though.  I arrived in Tampere at around 11pm, conveniently after the last train left for good ol Vaasa.  That meant I had two choices: stay in a hostel and take the 6am train to Vaasa to make to practice on time or, take a 1:15am train to Seinajoki, wait two hours and then take a 5:30am bus into Vaasa.  Of course I chose the second option and it was a terrible choice.  I ended up in the Seinajoki train station with about a half dozen alcoholics aka my new best friends and didn’t get any rest.  Needless to say training that day was more of a survival mission than anything else.

My train station "friends".

A week later, things looked up again as my dad came to Vaasa.  I don’t mention my dad on this blog very often, but he’s an integral part of my life.  There’s rarely a time where I make an important decision without consulting him.  He also is a sort of sounding board for me about things in my career.  I don’t have so many complaints here in Vaasa, but the ones I do have go to him rather than to my teammates because that risks causing problems in the team.  Every player has their grievances, and every player needs someone they can talk to who is not in any way subjective.  Most of the time when I’m upset about something, I just need my dad to tell me I’m right, then I let it go.  It sounds vain, but that’s what a person needs sometimes.  

Anyway, my dad was in town and came to our home game against KuPS.  I was really happy he got to see me play and even score a goal (he didn’t mention the heel-click celebration so I’m going to assume he loved it).  My dad is easily my biggest fan, but he’s only seen me play about 10 professional matches.  It was great that he got to see us beat KuPS and also went to Turku to see us beat Inter.  I was especially happy that he got to see Veritas Stadion as it’s one of the nicest stadiums in the league in one of the nicest cities in Finland.  I was also happy that I started both of those games (and all three of our wins this month, I might add :) ) so that my pops could see me play as much as possible while he was here.

My dad and I also visited Helsinki for a day and took the ferry over to Stockholm and spent a few days there, but in the interest of time I won’t go into details about that.  Maybe I can put some photos up from Sverige, but don’t hold your breath [edit: they're up].

Our next game is against champions-elect HJK.  Luckily for us, they haven’t yet clinched the title so we won’t have to clap them out in the pregame walkout.  It’s a great tradition that teams do that for the champions if they’ve won the league before the last game(s), but I would hate to do it for HJK or any other team.  I have huge respect for HJK, I would just be a little pissed off having to do that.  For the game itself, I actually think we have a decent shot at winning.  HJK will know now that they’ve won the league, and everyone knows that they are not quite as dominant away as they are in Helsinki.  We’ve beaten them before and our loss to them came on the back of two incredible shots which would be difficult to repeat.  We know that HJK is better than us, but that doesn’t mean anything if we’re better on the day.  It won’t be easy, but then again when was the last time we had an easy game?  We’ve only won 5 games by more than one goal, and of those five games, three times the “cushion” goal came in the last five minutes and four times in the last ten minutes.  The point is that we don’t play easy games ever, so knowing we have a hard game is nothing new.

That’s all folks.  I hope to see a big turnout this Monday as we look to secure third spot.  With the right results this weekend we could all but secure third spot.  It’s very unlikely, but that’s what people would have told you about us being third this time of year, so why not?  In a season of improbable results, why shouldn’t we all but clinch a Europa League spot and bronze medal with a win over the best team in the league?

The meme:

Skyfall

The sky is not falling.

Things haven’t gone so well for us the past few games (or the past few months, really) but VPS is still ok.  We’ve still got games against all of our rivals for 3rd place, and we’ve beaten all of them at some point this season.  There’s no reason to think that we can’t go on a run to finish these last eight games.  Like I said in my last post I think, we only need four more wins to essentially guarantee a third place finish.  We have RoPS at home (we’ve beaten them here already), JJK away (won there too), KuPS at home, Inter away (drew there), HJK at home (beat them this year), Jaro at home (beat them here), MIFK away (won there) and MYPA away (not looking forward to that).  My point is that even though I assume the fanbase is freaking out right now, things are not as bad as they seem.  Of course, a bit better play in July and August would have us maybe talking about winning a trophy, but that’s in the past and now we need to do what’s necessary to finish in third.

Obviously the main reason that finishing third is important is that it will give VPS entry into the 2013-2014 Europa League qualifiers and the $120,000 that comes along with it.  The possibility of a big bonus motivates players to want to play these games as much as prestige, since there really is no prestige in the first round of Europa League qualifiers.  They don’t even bother sending the maroon signage to put around the stadium.  They just send you a referee from Latvia or Moldova or somewhere and match you against a team from Uzbekistan (I know, and I’m not changing it).  That said, I don’t think that VPS will be throwing around huge bonuses anyway, since getting too loose with the pursestrings seems to have been a big problem in the near enough past that people still remember how poorly it went.  Realistically, bonuses would only come if VPS progressed to the second round or beyond.

Moving away from soccer, I need to apologize a bit to people who regularly check up on the blog.  I haven’t posted for the longest time since I started the thing.  I’m sorry about that, but I’m just all out of things to talk about.  I’ve essentially holed up in my apartment since Celia left and have lived an incredibly boring life.  I even started buying more frozen foods so that I wouldn’t have to go to the grocery store as often.  Essentially, I’m just missing America.  Last year I really missed my baby niece, since I had just gotten to know her a little bit then came to Europe.  Now, I miss almost everything about America, even things that are available here but that I don’t have.  I miss SportsCenter and HGTV.  I miss driving my car.  I miss the $1 menu at McDonald’s (and every other fast food place).  I miss going to Indianapolis Colts and Indiana Pacer games.  I miss being able to read all the signs.  I miss all of those things, not to mention my family and network of friends.  The reason I go to London whenever I get a chance is that it reminds me of America, and as much as I like to think otherwise I get homesick every time I come to Europe.  I’d probably be less homesick if I made $1 million a year, but I don’t think that’s gonna happen.  I don’t blame Finland for my feelings - if anything Finland makes it easier because everyone speaks english and I can communicate easily.  But if I get a bit homesick in Scandinavia after a few months, I can only imagine how I’d hold up in a Turkey or Austria or China.  I’ve gone on a bit of a tangent again, but the thesis of this paragraph is that I haven’t posted to the blog because I’ve been doing nothing because I’m a little homesick.

That’s all for now.  There is no skyfall just yet.  If we don’t take points off our next two opponents RoPS and JJK though, then maybe it will be time to go to DEFCON 5 (which despite being a phrase, is ironically the opposite of what it means.  DEFCON 5 in reality is not panic, but the least alert DEFCON status.  Something like the phrase “I could care less” which in english is commonly used to mean the opposite of what the phrase actually says).  And if the sky does fall, we’ll just call James Bond and he’ll save the day somehow.  I don’t know the particulars because we watched the movie on the bus and I fell asleep halfway through and woke up during the final scene.  I assume he just shot a lot of people and jumped off ledges until the day was saved.

See you at the game tomorrow!

The meme:  

Slump Buster

I’ve got my new computer, and I’m back blogging again!

I haven’t posted any blog posts this month, but that doesn’t mean a lot hasn’t happened.  We’ve ended our losing run, strengthened our chances of finishing in the medals and I had my best game all season.

Before I talk about those things though, I will state the obvious: my option for the rest of the season has been picked up and I’ll be a VPS player for at least the rest of this season.  That’s a relief, because up until August 1 I was unsure if I’d have a job this month and going forward.  I always assumed that VPS would want to keep me, but soccer is a business and the club has to do the best thing for them.  The clubs interests may not have aligned with paying my salary for the next three months.  I’m glad that wasn’t the case though and I get to stay.

I thought about doing a long post about our chances of finishing in the top three before we started our last round of 11 games, but I got too lazy.  Instead I’ll do a brief synopsis of what I was going to write.  I figure that we’ll need 50 points to guarantee a place in the medals.  Based on the 33 points that we had coming into our last 11 games, we needed 17 points to get there.  Essentially that means that we need five wins.  I came up with these estimates based solely on how teams are performing this year.  I didn’t look at the historical numbers needed to finish in the top three, I just looked at the teams close to us and their individual situations.  Jaro just sold their best midfielder; TPS is in a terrible slump at the moment; IFK Mariehamn had their two top scorers hurt, their best player sent back to Turkey and their best current attacker inexplicably buried on the bench; MYPA and KuPS are both really good, but seem too inconsistent to imagine either of them getting the 20+ points they’d need to finish over 50.  Everyone else is too far down the table I think.  The good thing about those numbers is that we only have to worry about ourselves.  That’s a big advantage, and a luxury I wish we had at Haka last year.

Since I waited so long to write this post, I can confirm that last weekend we got our first of those five wins.  We beat FC Lahti who, under the guidance of my former coach Juha Malinen, have been playing some of the best soccer in the league during the second round of 11 games.  They also beat us 3-0 a few games ago so they had a lot of confidence coming in.  I didn’t start the game, but I came on after only six minutes after a head injury to Atte.  That caused a bit of a shakeup in our lineup, as we were already quite short on defenders.  Jesper had to play in the back and he did a really good job in my opinion.  I came on and played my best game all year, due mostly to my increased movement.  Over the past few weeks, I’ve had just about everyone I talk to about my game tell me that I was playing too passively; That I was standing when I should be running, or that I was passing when I should be shooting or dribbling.  Those words finally have started to stick in my mind.  I had those words in my head when I attacked a defender and played a pass to Atte that led to him assisting a goal against Mariehamn, and I had it in my head for both goals I scored against Lahti.  I won’t say much more about the game, besides that I was really happy with how I played and how the team responded to going behind early.  We were in a really bad slump, but still showed that incredible team spirit that I always talk about.  According to the experts before the season, we had the 11th most talent, yet here we are with a medal a realistic goal.

In off-the-field “news”, Celia came to visit me for the past week.  It’s always nice to have her around.  She really makes life bearable in the absence of my family.  We didn’t really do much, but just being around her is good enough for me.  I even managed to not bankrupt myself like I did when I last visited her in London!  I like playing for VPS, but I really wish that Vaasa was a bigger city than it is.  Exactly the same as it is now, just with 10x as many people and all the attractions that come along with a population of that size.  I kind of avoid having people visit me because I just assume they’ll be bored.  It’s not a swipe at Vaasa, just saying that if someone was gonna travel all the way to Scandinavia I’d like them to have more to do than there is in Vaasa.  Or maybe I just don’t know the city as well as I should!  And any boredom she might feel here is balanced out by the overwhelming number of things to do in London.  I’ll be going there either early next month or in October, depending on if/how much time we have off during the international breaks.

That’s all for now.  We head to Turku next to play TPS.  This is a really big game as TPS could well be our biggest rival for third place this year.  A win for us would put us 12 points clear of them, though they’d have two games in hand.  Regardless, a win for us would make it very difficult for them to catch us as they’d have to win 6-7 of their last 11 games and have us implode.  A loss on the other hand would possibly take our destiny out of our hands.  We’re making our final preparations now and we’ll see how it goes!

No meme today since I don’t have any saved yet on my new computer.

A Change of Pace

The unbeaten steak is over L

We almost made it through all of June without losing, but in the very last game it all went to hell.  Since I last posted, we’ve won (1-0 JJK), lost (0-1 KuPS) and tied (0-0 RoPS).  I have no interest at all in talking about any of those games, but I do want to talk about my apparent new/old position, striker.

I have no idea what we were talking about here, but let's pretend we were talking about what position I'll play.

 

I’ve played the last two games as a striker, my natural position and the one I played growing up.  It may not seem like my natural position, considering that I haven’t scored any goals from there, but trust me it is.  I’ve been asked quite a bit if I prefer to play up front instead of the wing and my answers have been sincere: I honestly don’t care which position I play.  That said, in the second half of this season I believe I could be a more important asset as a striker than winger.  The first reason is that we don’t have any depth at the moment with our strikers.  I’m the only person other than Tomi to play as the top striker this season and only Sebastian and I have played Jarno’s normal position.  If I don’t play up top, then that effectively means that Tomi and Jarno will have to play almost every minute from now until November.  Of course we could always just sign a striker in August, but I don’t know what the plan is there.  If money grew on trees in Vaasa I’m sure that’d be an option, but then again if money grew on trees here I’d spend a lot more time outside J.  The second reason I think I can bring more to the team as a striker than as a winger is my style.  We have two strikers at the moment who are both really good, but neither is comfortable making runs behind the line.  That doesn’t make them easy to defend, but it is a bit predictable.  When I’m paired up there with one of them things open up dramatically.  The number of chances we created in the 20 minutes I played against JJK were greater than the number of chances in the first 65-70.  I think I’m a good change-of-pace (literally and figuratively) striking option.  Tired center backs don’t want to look over and see the fastest player on the field coming on fresh at striker for the last 20 minutes. 

I know I’ve made a bit of an argument as to why I should play striker, but I truly don’t care where I play.  Winger is probably my best position at this level of competition, and a coach or two have even suggested that I play as a fullback, though I never actually have.  Wherever Oka wants me to play I’ll play happily.

I went to the league website today, and was slightly surprised to realize that we are halfway through the season.  While I do feel like I’ve been in Vaasa for a long time, it doesn’t seem like the official games started so long ago.  Because the schedulemakers were drunk when they set the games, we’ve played 16 games in nine weeks, but only 17 in the next 16 weeks.  It’s gonna be nice at first to have a full week to prepare for each game.  It’s especially nice for VPS in particular, since our effective squad size is quite small.  Going forward from now we don’t really have to worry about rotating the squad.  We’ll have to deal with some suspensions and injuries over the next four months, but there are no more three-game weeks which is a relief.  I just hope that things don’t get super boring like they were down the stretch with Haka.  By the last month there we were training for an hour a day to preserve the bodies for the guys who were playing the games.  There is such a thing as too much free time, and I fear that the slowdown in games might lead to that here.

Another thing about the midseason point is that it kind of cements VPS’s place as a real contender for the title or medals in Veikkausliiga.  No longer can we be called a surprise or written off as a fantastic start.  Now we are surely recognized by the whole league as a team that can win things.  I must admit I didn’t come to Vaasa with trophies in mind, but now that we’re in the position I don’t see why we can’t win something.  We’ve seen every team in this league and some twice and nothing has made me think that we can’t finish at the top end of the table.

With the pace of the games slowing down a bit I’m going to make a point of getting out into the city and enjoying Vaasa before it gets cold again.  I haven’t been to the swimming area yet so I’ll have to go there.  I know that Finland can be brutal when it’s cold, so I’ll make the most of my extra free time in these summer months.  Netflix and PS3 will still be here in autumn.

 Lastly, I want to extend good luck to all the finnish teams in European competition this week and month, especially IFK Mariehamn who has Kris Bright and Dever Orgill.  Even though these teams are our rivals, their success makes us look better.  If every finnish team were to miraculously make the group stages of the Europe League and Champions League respectively, then Veikkausliiga would jump to like 15^th on the UEFA league coefficient and everyone would assume that I’m much better at soccer than I am because I play in that league J.  You had to know that I would somehow spin this to be about me, right?

 The meme:

Sitting Pretty

It’s been a tense week, but we did alright.  Two games and two draws against teams at the top of the table.  We didn’t necessarily play well for large parts of either game, but then again we rarely play well for large parts of a game and we’re 2^nd in the table so it clearly works for us.  Remember that fighting spirit I was talking about?  It was on full display in these last two games.  Teams that were picked to finish in the medals this year against a team predicted to be fighting relegation.  When the dust settled, we’re still above both of them.

 

Soccer wasn’t the only thing on the agenda this week though.  I, along with the rest of the team, visited the VPS juniors facility and watched the kids play.  A few of the players were coaches, so they were busy boasting about how much their team was gonna outplay the other player’s team and so forth.  I enjoyed getting out in the community because in general I don’t really do anything.  I train, then go home and either blog, play Playstation or watch Youtube/Netflix.  It can get pretty boring, so it’s nice to do something actually useful in the city.  Also, seeing the kids play brought back a bunch of good memories of playing for fun.  Being a pro is the best job ever, but it’s still a job.  For me, it has carried with it the stresses of a job for probably the last 10 years or so.  When I was young my teams all depended on me and now my job has taken me to a foreign country to a town I’d never heard of two years ago.  So it’s refreshing to see a ball roll directly past a kid because he’s more interested in looking at the sky because he heard an airplane.  I miss that! J

 

On Tuesday, it was my turn to answer questions on the facebook chat session that VPS hosts each week.  If you don’t know about it just add VPS as a facebook friend and the information should be there somewhere.  You can actually go there now and see the Q&A session, since I won’t rehash it.  The chat was fun and there were a lot more questions than I expected.  There was mention of my nickname among some fans being, “The Predator”, but I’m really pushing for “Jordan Seabrohimovic”.  I think you have to actually be good to compare yourself to Zlatan though, especially in Scandinavia.

 

I really hate talking about the games because anyone who cares already knows.  With the games coming so close though there’s really not much else going on.  The TPS game was incredibly boring and doesn’t deserve more mention than this one line.  The Honka game however was ridiculous and deserves to be talked about a bit.

 

Honka is a really good team.  They have signed 4-5 top-level talents for this league and have been storming through the league since about round 5.  How a team that lives in the shadow of a much bigger club and that couldn’t pay its players last year is able to go on a spending spree a few months later is open to speculation, but ultimately beside the point.  They dominated the first half, really giving us problems with their counterattacking style.  I can see why they have been so successful:  They have a strong backline that allows them to confidently counter in numbers.  Some teams counterattack with 3-4 players, but Honka was having counter moves of 6 or 7 guys running in all directions.  It was difficult for us to get a handle on, even though we enjoyed more possession.

 

The second half was very different from the first.  Honka predictably ran out of gas to play such an up-tempo counter game, so what in the first half was useless possession by us followed by a dangerous counterattack by them became just a ton of possession for us.  With that possession, and the arrivals of me and Grant Kerr to bring fresh legs and a different approach, we were able to be dangerous.  That pressure finally paid off with our one clear chance and Sebastian made no mistake.  We tied 1-1 for those who didn’t know.  The real story of the second half though, was the referee.

 

Now people who read this blog regularly know that I have a bit of a problem with the referees in this league.  Every game I get called for fouls that would never be whistled in America.  Things that I think are just not fouls at all.  Against Honka though our ref took things to a new level.  Not only did he blow his whistle every single time a Honka player fell for any reason (which was suspiciously often, almost like they were…GASP…diving?), but he didn’t call any fouls in our favor.  The papers mentioned two penalty kick claims that he missed in the second half, but in my opinion it was three.  The handball was obvious.  It wasn’t intentional by the defender, but his hands were away from his body so it has to be called.  It’s not even up to the ref to decide.  It’s as simple a decision as the ball rolling out of bounds.  It doesn’t matter how it got there, the call is ironclad.  The trip of Jarno was also obvious, but the ref was too scared to call a penalty in stoppage time.  The third incident actually happened against me.  Grant played me a great lofted ball into the box and as I chested it, I was clattered into by some defender.  It was as obvious a penalty as you’ll ever see and makes me wonder if perhaps I have somehow gained a reputation in this league as a diver?  I’ve never dove in my life (well……..at least not recently), yet I can’t seem to get a call in this league.  I’ll been elbowed in the face twice (things that would get players red carded in America) without a call.  I’ve been tripped dozens of times this season with no call all while being whistled for 2-3 fouls a game.  Enough of my little rant though, I just wanted to mention something that I did that might make our fans feel a little bit better about the ref.  When Sebastar scored, I high fived him but ran in the opposite direction of the celebration.  I tried to get the ball to give myself a logical reason of being next to the ref, but Honka immediately kicked it to midfield.  Regardless, I ran to the referee and essentially asked if he was enjoying Finnish summer, but with a bunch of American curse words he may have thought that I was insulting him and his performance.  Not that I would do something like that J.  If you’re someone at the Veikkausliiga office who has the ability to fine players, then I’m sure I remember just asking him about the weather, nothing else!

 

It’s midsummer today or tomorrow or both, I’m not really sure.  I find it weird that Scandinavian people celebrate this holiday, but then again Americans celebrate Cinco de Mayo by dressing in borderline-racist costumes and drinking Mexican beer made in Texas, so I guess I shouldn’t be throwing stones.  Our next game is against RoPS and Anthony is suspended so he doesn’t have to go.  He couldn’t be happier about it either, though he’ll miss us while we’re gone.  Until then though we have a few days off so I’m gonna go enjoy Vaasa!

 

The meme:

A Chance to Relax and a PED rant

Finally a break.

 

The home ground.

We’re essentially 1/3 of the way through the season and we are about to take a well earned week off.  VPS has played 10 games thus far, and our 6-2-2 record is good for 20 points and the joint top spot in the league.  That said, we’re only 4-5 point above 8^th place so it’s a bit too soon to be putting our name on the trophy.  If I’m being honest, these first ten games really have not been the greatest soccer that VPS has ever played.  We’ve only really dominated one game (RoPS) and the rest of our wins have only come by one goal, some in borderline miraculous circumstances.  I’ll take the points though, and if we manage to continue at this rate then we’ll probably win the league.  But then again that’s a really big IF and the league still has a long, long time to go.  What’s for certain though is that we’re gonna have to get a lot better in every aspect of our game.

 

The last two games have been fun.  We won both and against Jaro we had a great crowd.  The Jaro game was especially nice because the atmosphere was in stark contrast to a lot of the other games we’ve played at home.  The fans were behind us from start to finish, and what do you know we got better and better as the match went on.  It’s almost as if our fan support pushed the team to improve itself! ;)  I took some video after the game, but I got just the ending of our two little celebrations.  You get the point though.  We were very happy to win.

 

 

I also got my first assist of the season so I was happy with that.  I’m a winger so my main job is to create goals, so in my opinion getting assists is more important than even scoring goals.  I hope to get many more as the year goes on.

 

The game against Mariehamn was memorable for only one reason: we won despite playing terribly and without either of our first choice center backs for 2/3 of the game.  Winning while playing bad soccer has kind of become a theme for our club (or perhaps a motif, for those of you who enjoyed English class in high school…I guess what I call English class would actually be Finnish class or Swedish class for most people reading this, but you get the point).  I would prefer that we played better, but I can’t really complain with the results.  Clearly it’s working for us and it seems we don’t need to dominate games to win, which is kind of good news.

Ball in the net against Mariehamn.  Jyrki scored and me and Anthony are happy!

 

If you're wondering what we were saying it went something like, "Keep walking this way so we can catch our breath."  I'm not kidding that's what we were actually saying.

I also got to see my good friend from Haka, Kris Bright.  We both kind of suffered through some really tough times in Valkeakoski and really only had each other (along with Nana Attakora) to talk to during that time.  It was great to see him starting and doing well.  Things aren't going perfectly at Mariehamn, but he's definitely having more success there than either of us had at Haka.  I also saw and spoke with a fellow Yank, my friend Monica Dolinsky.  We both grew up in Indianapolis with similar stories.  She was one of the top handful of soccer girls in the state and I was the same for boys.  We never actually spoke though until after college when we ended up in the same circle of friends.  Now our lives are mirroring each other again, at least in the geographical sense.  She was in Sweden when I was and now she's been in Finland the whole time I've been here.  I hope her next stop is southern France/Spain or something!  She plays on the top women's team in Finland so that's awesome for her.  She also gets to go home for six weeks this summer, so I'm a bit envious!

 

I don’t really have anything else to say.  At least nothing relevant to my life personally or to VPS.  Instead, I’m gonna go off on a bit of an off topic rant.  If you care to know what I have to say then by all means keep reading.  If not, then I’ll be back next week after I return from vacation in London.

 

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At one of our hotels, I watched a debate (from Australia, no less) about performance enhancing drugs, or PEDs.  Now before I go into my thoughts about it I have to say that I have never used any PEDs (at least nothing that is illegal.  I would classify anything other than food as a PED.) and that I don’t know anyone using PEDs.  I don’t think I would even know the signs.  The debate though kind of struck a cord with me because it confirmed in my mind something that I’d already been thinking: PEDs should be legalized.

 

When most people hear someone say this the first thing they think is, “Oh no!  PEDs are bad and shouldn’t be in sports.  They take away the integrity of the game.”  But think about that…every professional athlete takes one thing or another to enhance his/her performance.  I make protein shakes almost every day to help me recover and to increase the effectiveness of my weight workouts.  Protein is perfectly legal and has no side effects that I’m aware of.  Surely no one would say that I am cheating the sport of soccer because of my protein shakes.  So my question is, “why are steroids or HGH or whatever else people are using illegal?”  These are also performance enhancers that when administered by a professional have little to no side effects.  Steroids can give you man-boobs?  Well I see man-boobs every single day so it must not be that awful.  I haven’t done a ton of research, but as far as I know, steroids and HGH have no devastating effects when taken properly.  If you don’t believe that, then explain to me why we give steroids to little kids who have asthma?  Or why steroids are in every hospital in the advanced world?  Every professional athlete would have equal access to these drugs, and if given by doctors then the risk would be minimal.

 

Speaking of risk to athletes, I don’t understand what argument can be made against PEDs that can’t be countered by an argument of things that athletes ARE allowed to do.  For instance if I break my leg tomorrow, I can go to the hospital and get a cocktail of drugs, use state-of-the-art technology and have surgery.  I’ll be back on the field in 5-6 weeks.  Is this natural?  Are the things that doctors would do to heal me not performance enhancing in a way that the body could never possibly do?  Then why isn’t leg surgery illegal?  I would guess there’s a better likelihood of me dying from complications from a leg surgery than from taking FDA-approved steroids on a monitored schedule.

 

The last argument against PEDs and the one that it’s opponents always fall back on because of its emotional appeal is the idea that PEDs ruin the essence of fair competition.  That sport exists to push the body to the limit and reward excellence.  For me, this is the worst argument of all.  Lance Armstrong used PEDs, but he still got his ass on that bike after having cancer and rode it across an entire country uphill.  I would bet that no one reading this blog could match what Armstrong did no matter what kind of steroids they had access to.  Armstrong is still a dick and a bad guy all-around it seems, but in my opinion that has nothing to do with the drugs.  That has to do with his over-the-top competitiveness and pressure to succeed.  The same applies to Barry Bonds, a former American baseball player who never tested positive for PEDs, but surely used them.  Steroids might have helped him gain strength, but there were plenty of guys in MLB that were stronger than Bonds and never hit half as many home runs.  There was clearly hard work and skill involved.  These athletes may have cheated, but only because the rules are stupid.  Armstrong and Bonds were both super athletes before they took PEDs, and both are healthy adults now after taking them.  So why are they so bad?  And before you answer that, consider that Lionel Messi took Human Growth Hormone (HGH) from the time he moved to Barcelona at age 12 until some time recently.  HGH is a banned substance, but since it’s a drug that mimics naturally occurring hormones there is no way to test for it.  Plus I’m sure he stopped taking them before he became a member of the FC Barcelona first team.  Messi is (rightfully) celebrated as a hero, even though he did effectively the exact same thing as Barry Bonds, who is a villain.  There’s a reason why Lionel Messi, who is 5’ 5” tall, has legs like a freaking elephant.  And it’s his inhumanly strong legs which give him his inhuman acceleration and agility.  I would argue that Messi’s athleticism is due in large part to HGH.  He was a great athlete who became the best soccer player in the world thanks in part to PEDs.  No one though would argue that Messi has cheated or that he has become the world’s best player because of PEDs alone.  So doesn’t that kill the argument that taking PEDs ruins the essence of sport?  Did Lionel Messi not work incredibly hard to get where he is?  And has he ruined the game?  Of course not.  But how much more fun would soccer be to watch if there were 25 other Lionel Messis?  How great could Michael Owen have been if he was able to use steroids to recover from all those injuries and HGH to prevent more from happening?  How much better would it be for fans if the greatest players could all play until 40?  These are not just hypothetical questions; they are the reality if we just removed the taboo of PEDs.  Science is at a point where taking things to improve performance are as common as lifting weights or running sprints.  You don’t like PEDs?  Well then stop taking your daily multivitamin or cough medicine when you get sick.  And don’t even think about taking Burana when you sprain your ankle.  That’s cheating!

 

The meme:

Matchday 7-9: So many games

It’s been quite a long time since I posted here, and boy has a lot happened.  Now if you’ve been wondering why I’ve written so little this month there is a simple answer: life just hasn’t been that interesting.  We’ve had games twice a week for the last month and we’re continuing on the same pattern.  That pretty much means that I have no life.  I can’t go out to bars or even the beach because I have to constantly recover from the previous game and prepare for the next one.  I could write about what’s been going on in the games, but honestly I think people have their own opinions and don’t much care about how I feel.  Besides, when you’re in the game it’s a bit difficult to be objective about the performance.  I’ve talked a lot about our games in my recent posts and will do some more again today, but in the future I’ll go away from that.  Anyway that’s the recap as to why I’ve been away.  I’ll try and post more frequently in the future!

Sonera Stadium

 

I think the last time I posted was after our loss to KuPS a few weeks back.  Since then we’ve played a Finnish Cup game against JJK (loss), away to Inter (draw), away to HJK (win) and away to MYPA (loss).  Now I know people are most interested in hearing about the HJK game, so I’ll spend the most time on that, but first I’ll go over the other three games briefly.  I’ll be mostly referring to my individual performances because it’s my blog and I feel like talking about myself.

 

The Finnish Cup quarterfinal against JJK was an absolute disaster.  I thought that we were totally dominated for most of the game and my performance was the worst of the season thus far.  I can’t explain why, but I just couldn’t get a foothold in the game at all.  My passes weren’t crisp, I gave a lot of balls away and generally just didn’t help VPS to win in any way.  I worked reasonably hard and had a handful of good moments, but that’s not good enough in a cup match with everything on the line.

 

Later that week we traveled to Turku to play Inter.  In contrast to JJK, I thought this was my best performance of the season.  Not to toot my own horn (which means I’m going to toot my own horn), but I felt like I was the most dynamic player on the field.  I say dynamic and not best player because even on my best day I’m never the most skillful player on the game.  My influence comes from being active and dangerous, which I was against Inter.  If you watch the highlight video you will see that 4-5 straight clips are my contributions.  In other words, for about a 30 minute span in the second half I did everything exciting.  It didn’t lead to anything so that’s a concern, but I was quite pleased with that game.

 

The biggest game so far in our season though was clearly our win in Helsinki against HJK.  They are the perennial power in the league and have an outstanding home record, even though they lost their previous home match to TPS.  We came in as big underdogs, but I wasn’t sure why.  We clearly have a good team capable of winning any game in this league and we have the league’s best backline and goalkeeper.  Add Anthony in with that group and I think our defensive-thinking players stack up with any group in the league.  When you have that sort of defense you are capable of having great success no matter what league you play in.  We started the game poorly though, and after nine minutes we were losing 1-0.  Things only got worse from there and we were lucky to get through the first 25 minutes without giving up more goals.  From about 30 minutes on though, the game was very competitive.  We made a few half chances for ourselves in the last ten minutes of the half and went into halftime with a bit of confidence despite being down a goal.

 

Jyrki before the HJK game.

The second half was much better for us, with our ball possession getting better and the game being played more and more in HJK’s defensive half.  I was told at halftime that I’d be coming on early in the second half for Tomi Ameobi and I was to play as the striker.  I thought that this was a great idea since HJK had substituted one of their stoppers and put in a guy who looked like he was 45-years-old.  There was no chance in hell that guy could do anything to stop me running for breakaway after breakaway.  However, Tomi’s play at the end of the first half and first few minutes of the second half earned himself more time and I came on instead for Jesper as the left winger.  The move turned out to be correct, as while we were changing the sub card Tomi scored the equalizing goal.  I like to think that, much like Lionel Messi, the mere suggestion of my substitution motivated the team to play better, but I don’t think I can take any credit for the first goal.  It was a good move to get the ball wide and crossed in, and then good composure by Tomi to settle himself and hit a good shot.  We were lucky to get a deflection for the goal, but who’s to say that Tomi’s initial shot wouldn’t have gone in anyway?

 

After our equalizer I was really proud of how we played.  Instead of going into a shell and just hoping to get a draw, we played even more aggressively and put pressure on the HJK players.  Ironically, the same external pressure that I complained about in my last post came on the HJK players in that game.  The crowd, instead of spurring their players on, starting to boo and hiss at them anytime something went wrong.  You could just look at some of the players and know that they were more worried about making a mistake than actually making a big play.  We VPS players on the other hand fed off that energy and forced HJK into mistake after mistake.  Finally, in a play that really sums up how good our team can possibly be, we scored a goal.  The play started with me, Antti and Anthony on the left side of the pitch.  HJK had the ball and was trying to go down their right side.  Antti stepped up to pressure the ball and I did the hard running to cover him in case he didn’t get the ball.  Then Anthony ran over and made a great tackle to win the ball and start us going up field.  Antti picked up the ball and ran 60 yards with it, drawing three HJK defenders.  Instead of working together and doing a bit extra work, all three of the HJK guys just kind of jogged alongside Antti assuming that one of their teammates would make a play.  Instead, Antii found a gap and slipped the ball to Jarno, who unselfishly played the ball over to Sebastian (who had sprinted 70 yards to get there, by the way) and “Seba-star” scored his first goal of the season.  It was a great counterattacking move that was worthy of winning a game like that.  When the final whistle came, I learned that this was VPS’s first victory away to HJK in 51 years.  I was surprised by that, but then again Sonera Stadium is not an easy place to win games.

Going for a run the day after HJK.

 

Heading to MYPA.

Three days later, we played MYPA and got killed 3-0.  There’s a lot of things you can say about that game, but I’ll only mention a couple.  First, MYPA is a really good team, much better than I thought they were.  They were fresh after a 9 day break between matches and we were playing our 4^th game in like 11 days or something.  Second, I think that the HJK win meant so much to some of the players and staff that we could never get ourselves mentally ready for the challenge that MYPA posed just a few days later.  While beating HJK wasn’t a big deal to me (I’ve played them twice now without losing), it was a very big deal to a lot of guys in this club.  It was the kind of win that you need to have a week to refocus, but we only had three days.  Hence we didn’t even start playing against MYPA until the second half.  By then, it was 2-0 and there wasn’t much that we could do.

 

The brofriends on the bus.  There were plenty of open seats but they sat together.

Tomorrow we play our hated rivals Jaro.  I don’t really have any ill will toward them, but if VPS hates them then I guess I gotta hate them, at least tomorrow.  I’ll be interested to see how physical or nasty this game gets.  Maybe a physical game will suit me since I seem to be the dirtiest player in the league at the moment.  I get called for two or three fouls every single game despite not playing any differently than I did when I was in America.  I think I was called for maybe 10 fouls in the entire three years I played in the US.  Meanwhile apparently nothing that happens to me is a foul anymore.  Against MYPA I got crushed three times and only once was anything called.  One of the three times I got elbowed in the eye and the foul was called on me.  Maybe tomorrow’s game will be one of the few that my normal playing style isn’t considered rough.  I hope so.

 

The meme and GIF: