Peking – DIF
It has finally started again. After a long, dark, cold winter without soccer (live anyways) the first games of the year were played yesterday. I was of course there to see DIF beat Peking in Norrköping with 2-1. I hope to be able to write something about every game I see live this year and I’ll start right away. 
As I mentioned, DIF went to Peking yesterday for this seasons first game. About 6000 DIF supporters tagged a long and got to see a fairly entertaining match. DIF started the game great, the team put a lot of pressure on Peking and after only 6 minutes DIF scored the first goal. DIF kept pressuring and should have scored again but bad luck with an offside call (was it really offside? Didn’t look like it…) and poor focus in front of goal kept the score at 0-1 at half time.
It was a good half of soccer by DIF eventhough Peking made some good progress at the end of the half. All in all DIF was better and seemed to control the game. As the second half began the game was pretty much like the end of the first half where both teams had some chances but nothing really dangerous. Both teams defense seemed to be able to stop most attacks before they became dangerous until DIFs Rickard Dahlberg decided to jump over the ballto see it go straight by the defender and to Sebastian Rajalakso, the 19 year old debutant, who made no mistake when putting the ball in the back of the net. 0-2 to DIF and we were very happy.
2 minutes later Peking went on the attack and got a corner kick and just as I was telling a friend, “If we can hold on to 0-2 for atleast 10 minurtes I think this game is done for”, they score a goal with a bit of luck and all of a sudden the game was close again with over 30 minutes left to play.
The rest of the game was a pain. Still in the lead but a one goal lead is a fragile one and Peking was allowed more chances than we liked. DIF had several chances to close the game by scoring again but was simply unable to get the ball past Pekings keeper. We all felt relief when the referee finally blew the whistle for full time. Victory in the first game and 3 solid points on the long road to the gold.
Beside the win, the one thing that pleased the most was the two debutans in DIF: Sebastian Rajalakso & Martin Andersson. They both came from Enköping this season and they both performed really well yesterday. From time to time you could always get that 2002 feeling again when we were almost unbeatable. If we can get to score a bit more and minimize the mistakes in midfield I think we’ll be right there at the top when the league comes to an end. I am carefully optimistic.
