Martha, My Dear

This is it then, the Euro 2025 playoff final. One last hurdle for Scotland to clear before they can take their place in Switzerland next summer.

Of course, Finland will be saying likewise.

Tonight’s first leg at Easter Road is absolutely crucial and Scotland will be looking to get another win to take to Finland next week, building on what has been a decent campaign to get to this point.

Taking sixteen of the available eighteen points from the Nations League style qualifying group was decent, dropping points only in the opening goalless draw away to Serbia and only conceding a single goal to Israel in a 4-1 victory. I’ll not go over those games again here though as I’ve done that in previous blogs.

That was then followed up by beating Hungary home and away in the playoff semi final. The 1-0 win over there came courtesy of Martha Thomas…

Whilst the 4-0 win at Easter Road was thanks to an own goal from Lauren Ann Brzykcy and goals from Erin Cuthbert, Caroline Weir and Martha Thomas once more.

That’s seven goals that Martha Thomas has scored during this campaign, seeing her second top scorer across all of qualifying, behind only Lara Prašnikar of Slovenia who has nine. And they’re out at the hands of Austria, so a wee hat trick across these two legs would be nice…

Finland didn’t have quite the same run in qualifying as Scotland did, but that’s due to them being in League A and having a far tougher set of fixtures. Indeed, Finland finished bottom of their league, and so they’ll be in League B next time out whilst we’ll be back in League A. Kinda feels like teams like Scotland and Finland might yo-yo this way, doesn’t it?

Despite the tougher fixtures, Finland were unbeaten at home, inflicting Italy’s only defeat with a 2-1 win.

In their other home games, they drew 1-1 with both the Netherlands and Norway.

Where they came unstuck was in their away form, losing all three games without scoring a goal in the process. 4-0 defeats to both Italy and Norway, and 1-0 defeat to the Netherlands.

However, just about every team made the playoffs in some form or other, except for the top eight teams in League A who qualified for the finals without the need for the playoff. Finland were paired with Montenegro who had finished second in League C. Like Scotland, Finland won 1-0 on the road, an early goal from Linda Sallstrom.

But went one better than Scotland in the home leg by winning 5-0, and thus 6-0 on aggregate. Ria Oling, Nea Lehtola, Vilma Koivisto, Linda Sallstrom and Lili Halttunen with the goals.

Finland have been something of a thorn in Scotland’s side though. Even in our last meeting with them, in the Pinatar Cup final earlier this year, they beat us on penalties after Martha Thomas had drawn Scotland level following Oona Sevenius’ early opener.

Finland were a major reason Scotland failed to qualify for the last Euros, the only other time the sides have met competitively. Indeed, Finland topped the qualifying group a full ten points clear of Scotland, with Portugal three points behind them in second place. You’ll note that means Portugal were seven clear of us, so it’s not quite right to say that Finland knocked us out as we also lost both games against the Portuguese. However, if you turn those two 1-0 defeats against Finland into two 1-0 wins for Scotland, which isn’t unreasonable as the games were tight, suddenly Portugal win the group and Scotland are in second place and into the playoffs.

Here’s the home game from that campaign. You’ll see from this not only did Scotland dominate it, but the last ditch goal is almost ridiculous. This result confirmed our elimination from qualifying.

Portugal did lose their playoff to Russia, but then went to the Euros anyway when UEFA kicked Russia out of everything. Finland lost all three of their group matches, whilst Portugal drew one and lost the other two. But at least they were there, unlike Scotland. We don’t want to miss out this time!

Our other results against Finland in the past have been mixed. There were two friendlies in the space of a week in September 2011. I’ll save the one in Finland for next week’s second leg, but the one at Tynecastle saw Scotland run out 7-2 winners! Jen Beattie and Jane Ross got two goals each, and there were also goals from Hayley Lauder and Rachel Corsie, with an own goal thrown in for good measure.

I’ll also save the several other friendlies over the years for next week too, because again they were all in Finland. The only other friendly that has been played in Scotland came in August 2006 and it was a goalless draw.

The game tonight at Easter Road kicks off at 7.35pm and it’s live on the BBC Scotland channel if you can’t get along. The second leg in Finland comes along on Tuesday, so more on that then. Hopefully Scotland can take a positive result into that match and give ourselves a great chance to win this tie.

Good luck to Scotland tonight!