The Turku Palloseura ruined Tampere’s dream of the local finals of the Finnish Championship League and advanced to the finals on Saturday after winning the Ilves semi-finals. The team’s head coach Jussi Ahokas and center striker Juuso Pärssinen praise Turku’s spring puck atmosphere.
Samu Saatsi,
Jussi Saarinen
Tampere’s Tappara and Turku Palloseura will face each other in the finals of the 2021–22 Finnish Championship season. Tappara won his final place last spring with his new Turku club on Saturday. TPS decided that the people of Tampere dreamed of local finals by ringing Ilves 4–2 in the semi-finals.
– This is an insanely clean thing. Every season we start with the championship as our goal, now we are back in the finals where we fight for it. So we are on the right track, one of the sharpest in the attack of the Turku Ball Club Juuso Pärssinen rejoices.
The semi-finals were extended to the sixth match on Good Friday after Ilves won in front of their home crowd in Tampere. However, TPS was strong at home, as it has been able to do in its previous playoffs.
Pärssinen praised almost all the audience in Turkuhalli after turning to the black and white semi-finals.
– The victory in the sixth game was earned. We were playfully ahead of Ilves, but the boost brought to our home audience was the crucial difference. Not in front of that support can not be lost. It is incomprehensible to describe how great a resource it is to us. The audience shouts and empathy, waves are drawn in the auditorium and some swing without a shirt. It all feels like we’re taking care of this on the ground. There was anything on the scoreboard, Persian praised
TPS head coach Jussi Ahokas is also a happy man, but he too does not yet have a belly full of success.
– This is not enough for us yet. Tappara is a very potential challenge for us, but we are ready for it. It’s great that so many of the boys have experienced the finals last year. We will go to these finals as underdogers. However, we are a unified challenger with the use of four flat chains, Ahokas estimates.
The Persian chain lives on its self-confidence
According to Ahokka, TPS has grown to its current pace during the season. According to him, the upward trend alone has not been the reason why the people of Turku are playing in the Finnish Championship finals for the second time in a row.
– Our trend has been upward. It was good that after a good start to the season, we also had a bad period. With that, we had to go through the things that it really takes to win in this series. It has carried this far, but our season is badly over, Ahokas describes.
The full implementation of his own role, highlighted by head coach Ahokka, will be emphasized in TPS’s top-chain game. Persian, Markus Nurmi and Mikael Wipe have taken great responsibility as the scoring team of the Ball Association in the playoffs. According to Pärssinen, the trio will have enough strength for the finals as well.
– We really have the energies at the moment. We have a strong competitive spirit and the will to win, exactly what is happening on the field, Pärssinen assures.
– Self-confidence and our faith are hard at the moment. We all believe in each other and in ourselves. We want to print things out, through which we also get finish spots. Our skills are then enough to put them in. However, it all starts with that self-confidence and work.
Ahokas describes the chemistry of the chain as so strong that no disintegration has been considered during the past season.
– We have kept them together almost all season, whenever all three have been healthy. Last spring, they played good playoffs, but now they’ve put even more of Napsu into the game. Successes, and with it self-confidence, feed them. I still believe that they will get even more out of them, the pilot from Turku estimates.
No kicking tricks
A young striker from TPS Eetu Liukas on Saturday told Urheilu that the people of Turku should not watch what Tappara did. However, head coach Ahokas is aware that the opponent must also be monitored. He considers Tappara a skillful star cream for which he has been acquired Veli-Matti Savinainen and Ville Leskinen still on the way along.
– Of course we look at their way of playing and where we could hit. However, it needs to be modified in our own way, not to change our own identity. I don’t believe in hokkuspokkus tricks myself, but it’s our long-term job that matters.
– We can’t leave any situation unfamiliar. Everyone must be able to resolve situations individually, whether the player is in an offensive or defensive position. That’s what it solves for, the series are caught up in such little things when everything is put into play, Ahokas analyzes.
Everything in TPS’s game is also based on a certain level of discipline in Pärssinen’s speech and the work of all four field players.
– Whoever is on our team, he has to do his job. We always play through defense because the better you defend, the better you attack. We also have the best goalkeeper in the entire league in our goal, which gives us the opportunity to play boldly, Pärssinen says.
– At the moment we don’t want anything else to bring joy to the people of Turku and the championship is the way we can bring it, Pärssinen says.
According to Ahokka, the finals are above all a celebration of the players, to which the coaches try to get exhausted but get more out of it.
– This is a great time, the game days and breaks are already getting mixed up. Everyone just focuses on the next game, whichever is better. And most of all, the fact that the auditoriums are full and the halls have a great feeling. After all, the atmosphere we had in the solution game in Turku, for example, may not be enjoyed, he glows.