Pasanen back to boost Finland

Antti Muurinen, the Finland coach, has announced his squad for the forthcoming EURO 2004™ qualifying matches.

Pasanen back from injury
Petri Pasanen of AFC Ajax is back from injury to strengthen the Finnish defence and Antti Sumiala has been called up to give Muurinen an extra option in attack where the team has fallen short of late. However, Chelsea FC striker Mikael Forssell is still unavailable because of injury.

Need points
Finland play Azerbaijan on 12 October in Helsinki and then Yugoslavia four days later in Belgrade. Finland need to take some points from the two matches as they lost their first game at home to Wales 2-0 and have two daunting matches against Italy to come.

Very confident
"Everybody in Finland said that our qualification campaign was over after we lost to Wales," Muurinen said. "That is nonsense. This is only the beginning and we're still very confident. Against Wales we generally played well but failed to score and of course this is something we must work on."

Finland squad
Jääskeläinen, Niemi, Enckelman, Heikkinen, Hyypiä, Kuivasto, Nylund, Pasanen, Saarinen, Tihinen, Johansson, Kolkka, Kuqi, Litmanen, Nurmela, Riihilahti, Sumiala, Tainio, Wiss.