Sweden Squad for Finland and the Netherlands

September 28th, 2011 | by: aron |

Hamren has called up the troops for action and its time for a little analysis of what is coming our way on the 7^th of October. Here is the full squad:

Andreas Isaksson, Johan Wiland

Mikael Lustig, Pierre Bengtsson, Andreas Granqvist, Daniel Majstorovic, Olof Mellberg, Jonas Olsson, Martin Olsson

Emir Bajrami, Christian Wilhelmsson, Rasmus Elm, Johan Elmander, Alexander Gerndt, Samuel Holmen, Tobias Hysen, Kim Källström, Sebastian Larsson, Anders Svensson, Ola Toivonen, Pontus Wernbloom, Zlatan Ibrahimovic

So these are the guys who are going to go toe to toe with the Finns. The big surprise of the day was that Hamren took the recent loss to Hungary as an opportunity to clean house in the ranks. Players with little playing time and who have not shown enough for the national team of late are being dropped. That means that Behrang Safari and Oscar Wendt (both bench warmers for now at their respective clubs) have been cut. The only interpretation possible for this move is that they have not shown enough to be worthy of the national team.

Pierre Bengtsson is in because he is a regular though unfortunately in a lesser league (FC Copenhagen) at left back and I don´t think its any stretch to say that he will also be warming the bench for the national team come the Finland game. Martin Olsson will be the starting left back in his second competitive game for Sweden. I really hope he is what we have been missing.

The other talk of the day besides the talk about Ibrahimovic (which I will get to in a bit here), has been about Majstorovic. The man has a place on the bench at Celtic and it doesn´t look like he is going to be getting all that much playing time in the near future. Enter Jonas Olsson then against Finland? I am not going to rule that out completely, he plays every game for WBA and gets consistently high ratings. Olsson and Mellberg together wouldn´t be a bad idea at all.

Ibrahimovic has been injured for what seems like almost a month now. Supposedly he is going to get playing time in the next two games for AC Milan. First he will play tonight against Plzen in the Champions League and then against Juventus in Serie A. I am not sure he will be entirely matchfit come the 7^th but I don´t have any better options to be honest.

Predicted starting eleven at this moment is:

Isaksson

Lustig, Olsson, Mellberg, Olsson,

Elm, Källström

Elmander, Toivonen, Wilhelmsson

Ibrahimovic

We have to win against Finland. There is no other way to get to the Euros!