Ufa hosts Tomsk in the first leg of Russian Premier League relegation finals. The match will be played on Thursday, May 30th at Neftyanik Stadium (Ufa)
I think that in this battle for the right to play in the Premier League in the next season, there is less intrigue than in the match between Nizhny Novgorod and FC Krylya Sovetov Samara.
It might have seemed to someone that Ufa outspokenly choked in the final portion of the season, getting skunked in the last three matches of the championship. I think this is a wise plan! Ufa looked very decent in the portion from the 21st round to the 26th. The team won and took away points even from the teams at the level of CSKA. And when it became clear that Ufa won’t maintain a place in the elite, and the direct relegation doesn’t threaten the team, it immediately switched to energy saving mode! Being in this mode, the team held matches where nothing could be changed anymore. And now Ufa is certainly fresh and ready for the decisive battles! Especially the men of Vadim Evseev were quite lucky with the rival! This Tom is much better than the ambitious Nizhny Novgorod!
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Probably nobody knows why Tom needs to promote to the Premier League… Not the team itself and particularly the bosses of Russian football. What can Tom bring to the future season of the RPL? Well, it has constant problems with home games; the footballers cannot play there in October and cannot play in April yet... In the end, Tom will play most of the home games somewhere else on the other side of the country... Moreover, it has problems with finances. Tom can imperceptibly replace the character under the name of Anzhi. Tomsk has really starved for a couple of years and almost died of hunger on the field... The team could occupy this niche in Russian football because it always has no money, and they are whining about it…
As for the chances that Tom will be in the elite for the next season, they are clearly not great. The team frankly collapsed in spring, since it confidently moved in the zone of direct promotion to the Premier League the first part of the season. In spring, Tom quickly began to descend to 3-4 places, where it actually stopped... Maybe this a kind of plan, because the team is well aware that returning to the Russian elite is a bad idea... Alternatively, it really had enough strength only for the first half of the season... Tom clearly looks like an obvious outsider of the upcoming confrontation against the background of Ufa.
I chose to bet on the victory of Ufa! However, I fully admit that the hosts will salt away a game in the first match and manage to score more than one goal, so you may bet on a minus handicap.
Prediction for the match: Ufa to win
