TFT Issue 3281!

Today’s featured game is the Swiss Challenge League encounter between Grasshopper Zurich and SC Kriens.

I am comfortably aware that the home side should be the main candidates for promotion this season, but whether they manage it or not is anyone’s guess. They were good enough last season but still managed to bottle it. This season, they’ve opted for a whole different approach, bringing in a new manager and attempting to play very ‘Portuguese’ football because of it. It’s partially worked, but mostly because their contemporaries have been so busy taking points off one another that none have genuinely challenged the table-toppers. Time will tell if that changes or not.

Still, one thing that has improved is Grasshopper Zurich’s ability to hold teams at arm’s length. When teams got the gist of what they were doing earlier in the season, things began to go very badly very quickly for the promotion hopefuls, which is when I left them alone for a bit. Now they’ve refocused, tweaked a couple of things, and are back to beguiling opponents with their possession game. They’ve not mastered the ‘efficiency’ side of things yet; I still need to see more in the final third before I actually trust them to win matches.

However, I do trust them to annoy teams. Say what you like about Aarau, FC Thun, and FC Schaffhausen – they’re all goal-scoring teams. None of them have managed to score more than once against Grasshopper Zurich though, and that says a lot, especially in a high-scoring Challenge League division. Again, Grasshopper Zurich are not playing perfectly, but they’re doing enough to control games and generally get what they want, and given what they’ve spent, that’s exactly what they should be doing. They’re one of the top teams in this division, and they want to control games, so that’s basically what happens.

SC Kriens specialise in annoying teams though. Their togetherness is simply superb. On paper, they’re only marginally better than the likes of Chiasso, especially after their squad was raided pre-season – again! – but they just keep rolling on. Honestly, they’re real battlers, SC Kriens. It helps that they’ve somehow managed to keep hold of star Portuguese striker Abubakar, of course – I’ve no idea why nobody signed him pre-season after he carried them last season. Still, he’s in town, and that means other teams need to be very careful because they’ll seldom surrender leads, SC Kriens, and not many teams will rival their work-rate.

The problem for SC Kriens is that Abubakar really is their only consistent attacking threat, so his absence tonight is a problem that they simply cannot solve. The work-rate remains intact, the organisation remains intact, and the stubbornness does too, but their effectiveness in the final third simply isn’t there. Against a Grasshopper Zurich team that are controlling games well, it makes me wonder if SC Kriens can even score here. I appreciate that that in itself is quite a bold statement to make, given the relative amateur nature of the division, thus making goals rather easy to come by, but it’s true – Abubakar is everything for SC Kriens in attack.

I will say this for the visitors, though – they’re better at avoiding defeat than Grasshopper Zurich because they’ve been playing that way for longer. Remember that SC Kriens have had to be underdogs ever since they returned to the Challenge League a few years back; Grasshopper Zurich are Switzerland’s most successful ever club, and the onus is constantly on them to win games, and to return to the Super League. This new style of theirs is working – for now – but it would be misleading to believe that they’re suddenly magnificent at it. I think SC Kriens can cause their hosts problems here because a draw would suit them just fine. Grasshopper Zurich will probably still edge it, but the 1×2 market is off-limits to me.

Backing under 3 goals at 49/50 just makes sense though. If either team does score, they’re not going to be in a hurry to score again, so this should be a low-scoring affair.