Allsvenskan Round Two

April 11th, 2011 | by: aron | Comments Off

Its time for the Allsvenskan Round Two review: in many ways it wasn’t really all that surprising, except in one or two of the games (IFK Göteborg I am looking at you). Some of the expected patterns are emerging and I think that my season predictions are still holding, of course it was only the second round so there are probably some surprises coming up in the next couple of weeks.

I begin with the Monday evening games: Malmö FF struggled early and was even down a goal against former assistant coach Pep Ruiz’s Halmstads BK, until they managed to score a cheap red card when Malmöite Jimmy Durmaz wrestled one of the HBK players to the ground and then got a punch in return. Of course the referee only saw the punch and off went the HBK player. Shortly thereafter Malmö scored two and then went on to polish the numbers and left it standing at 3-1. Note that this was just about what one could expect from a meeting of these two teams. Personally, I was hoping to see Pekalski back in action but he didn’t even make the bench.

Djurgården paid a visit to Kalmar FF’s new stadium as well on Monday night. Now if you are going to build a new stadium and hype it, you damn well better be able to win in it. Kalmar FF did just that and who knows, maybe we just found the super strong home team for the season? Kalmar 3 Djurgården 2. This result also points to the fact that Djurgården now have some issues and will not be capable of a top three finish.

AIK played really bad for ninety minutes, even letting Mjällby roll the ball around as much as they desired. However, as many of us have learned from watching enough football, just having the ball is only a nice statistic if you can’t actually do anything with it. AIK somehow scored three goals and Mjällby scored none. Despite the dominant score of this game, AIK has still failed to impress in these first two rounds.

Helsingborg played hosts to Elfsborg and also beat them 1-0 courtesy of an own goal. Elfsborg missed a well-earned penalty, which could have salvaged a tie. Neither team is doing all that much for me this far, but given that Helsingborg have now won two straight there isn’t all that much too say against them. Gerndt has yet to score a goal and that might be a worrying note.

In the first Gothenburg Derby, Häcken hosted Göteborg and beat them 3-1. Is there a crisis brewing in IFK at the moment? My guess is that if they manage to lose the next game, that is they start the season with three losses with a squad as good as theirs, then Jonas Olsson gets the boot as head trainer. Note that IFK wore some kind of ugly pink kit for this game: its a great color for losers to dress up in.

In a game of the bottom dwellers, Gefle proved they could win at home this season as they beat Norrköping 2-0. There is nothing more to add here except that I expect more from Norrköping. GAIS also put a hurt on Trelleborg with a 4-0 trouncing on Saturday, but I could care less about either team.

The Friday night game between Örebro and Syrianska turned out to be a low scoring affair that the home team won 1-0. Örebro are going to be a force to be reckoned with this season so mark my words now.