Apologies to those of you who care about such things - I've missed off numerous accents and whatnot from some Ocelandic names because I haven't got much time and they tend to double the writing time for a post!
I would love to go into laborious detail about how
ÍA Akranes sailed through the Intertoto cup before battling all the way through to a fairytale UEFA Cup final, but to be honest it didn't quite happen. No surprise there then. Europe isn't meant for Icelandic upstarts, especially not those with Faroese managers. If Icelandic football is well below the radar of football fans around Europe then heaven knows where Faroese football fits in. That said, possibly more people notice the Faroe Islands' national team results because they are plucky little underdogs from a northern archipelago who make a habit of getting thrashed (certainly under
Jakup Poulsen's glorious 3 year reign). Iceland, on the other hand, tend to just keep losing or drawing, but are generally not quite so bad as to get thrashed very often.
So,
ÍA's Intertoto cup "run"...well, the highlight (singular) came just 5 minutes into their opening match against Finnish side
Inter Turku, when midfielder
Halldor Steinar Kristjansson drilled home the opening goal of a match the home side dominated from start to finish. Unfortunately it is goals which win games though, not passing, possession, shots on target or any other impressive stats
ÍA could dredge up as evidence of their dominance. With 56 minutes on the clock,
Inter Turku equalised with their only shot on target of the whole match, and that was that for the afternoon, a 1-1 draw.
9 days later the team, and a few fans who obviously had nothing better to spend their money on, flew hundreds or thousands (to be honest nobody could remember!) of miles out to Turku. There they proceeded to spend 90 minutes running around a football pitch with another 11 players and a spherical object. Ostensibly the aim of this exercise was for the 11 players from
Akranes to put the ball, by whatever legal means possible, into the back of the net guarded by the other 11 players. The other 11 players were likewise supposedly aiming to convey the ball into the net guarded by those first 11 men, the ones from Akranes. In the event, anyone visiting this spectacle who had never heard of the game of football might have been surprised to know that those were the two team's respective aims. They mustered 3 shots on target between them, wasted 2 hours of the locals' time and a whole day of the Akranes' fans time, and all shook hands before heading back to their respective homes with a 0-0 draw. Counting how many handshakes took place between players and coaches of either side was about as interesting as the game.
So that was Europe as far as
ÍA Akranes were concerned. So pathetic had they been that they had cunningly managed to avoid any trips into the deeper depths of mainland Europe (for those of you not quite up on your European geography, Finland is
up there in the north not a million miles away from Iceland). At least next season they would be starting off in the UEFA cup qualifying, having won the Icelandic cup.
Grindavik though were hoping to be a little more adventurous in the 2008 European campaign, having just completed their 3rd domestic season under their manager. Unlike
Akranes,
Grindavik really would have to travel thousands of miles...infact, you would be hard pressed to find two teams further apart contest a European match as the draw sent
Grindavik out into the wilds of Kazakhstan to face
Irtysh Pavlodar...
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