SWEDEN: Allsvenskan Round-Up

A newly revitalised Djurgården make it four games unbeaten, whilst Helsingborg go four points clear at the top.

With the Danish Superliga over and the Norwegian Tippeligaen on its annual summer break, Sweden’s Allsvenskan was the only top tier Scandinavian league in action this week.

As has been the case since Per-Mathias Høgmo took control of the reigns at the club, Djurgården’s miraculous turnaround after a woeful start to the season just keeps going on and on, and this week they extended their unbeaten run to four games and won their second game since the Norwegian’s arrival when they beat sixth-place Kalmar 1-0 at home. Top goalscorer for the club so far this season Amadou Jawo scored the game’s only goal quarter-of-an-hour in to send Djurgården off the bottom of the table and up to twelfth-place, equal on points with eleventh-place Öster.

Öster also picked up an impressive win this weekend when they beat third-place IFK Göteborg 2-0, thanks to second-half goals from Mario Vasilj and Vladica Zlojutro, with the former’s goal being his first of the campaign and the latter’s being his fourth since his move from second-tier side Värnamo last December. IFK Göteborg have stumbled somewhat recently after going unbeaten in their opening six games of the season and now sit sandwiched between second-place Elfsborg, who overtook them this week as a result of their 1-0 win over tenth-place Häcken, and fourth-place Malmö FF, after only managing to win twice in their last five games.

Malmö FF have also been on a poor run recently but seem to be back to their usual winning ways, beating second-to-bottom-place Brommapojkarna 3-1 away from home. Twenty-one-year-old Emil Forsberg scored a double, his first goals for the club since his move from GIF Sundsvall, and Simon Thern scored in the eighty-first minute to cancel out Niklas Bärkroth’s goal early in the second half; the goal is the youngster’s first for Brommapojkarna since his 2011 loan spell with the club when he was an IFK Göteborg player.

Syrianska FC drew 1-1 with thirteenth-place Gefle on Tuesday evening to move out of the relegation zone and into the relegation play-off spot, condemning Brommapojkarna to fifteenth place. It remains as cramped as ever at the bottom, however, with just three points separating bottom-of-the-table Halmstad and eleventh-place Öster.

It’s a similar story in the middle of the table as well, as there are only two points between tenth-place Häcken, who are three points ahead of Öster, and sixth-place Kalmar. As the season continues, the gap between these pockets of clubs seems to widen, with Helsingborg the only exception at the top, sitting four points clear.

Eighth-place Åtvidaberg, ninth-place Norrköping and tenth-place Häcken remain equal on fourteen points after all three were defeated this week. Åtvidaberg were easily brushed aside by Helsingborg who beat them 3-0 at Olympia on Saturday afternoon – with two goals coming in the first half from Alejandro Bedoya and Adrian Gashi, and a late third coming from Christoffer Andersson – whilst Norrköping were less convincingly beaten at home by seventh-place AIK, with Nabil Bahoui scoring the game’s only goal to extend AIK’s unbeaten run to three games.

The win of the weekend goes to Mjällby who moved up to fifth in the table, three points clear of sixth-place Kalmar, as a result of their 5-1 thrashing of bottom side Halmstad. Five different players scored for the Hällevik side, with long-serving Marcus Ekenberg opening the scoring after half an hour, before Mikael Boman equalised for the visitors four minutes later. The scores stayed level until the hour mark, when four goals in twenty-four minutes (with a red card for Halmstad’s Christian Järdler coming shortly after the first goal) from Daniel Nilsson, Kristian Haynes, Hannes Sigurðsson and Marcus Pode condemned Halmstad to their fifth defeat of the season and their heaviest since they were beaten by the same scoreline by Malmö FF in September 2011.