Futsal England

First Loss for Jay Corran in Romania

Jay Corran, playing for Odorhei in the Romanian Futsal Championship, talks to FutsalEngland.com about his first taste of defeat in this seasons campaign..

"This week saw Odorhei’s first league defeat of the season at the hands of Deva. We lost 7 – 5 but only had ourselves to blame with some terrible defending. It means we slip down to 2nd in the league but overall the team weren’t too disappointed as we have a run of games coming up with good chances to win - so we’re still feeling very confident.

The week started with 2 training sessions on the Tuesday, followed by a massage afterwards, then just one session on Wednesday. Wednesday’s session was very tough, I struggled a little with the communication for the first time and didn’t pick up the idea of some of the exercises for a while. Thursday was a busy day, we trained early on then the club had a press conference that I had to attend, to announce the partnership with ‘Ciuc’ beer. It was good fun to see this side of the club, the ‘behind the scenes’ bit. A bit of pool in the afternoon preceded training and the day was complete. Also found out on Thursday that the weekend’s game was now, not going to be shown on TV and so it was to be played on the Sunday. We would travel Saturday and so Friday’s training became the last session of the week.

Thursday and Friday also saw my appearance on BBC Television in England, with a report on the lifestyle here and also a piece on last weekend’s game, by all accounts it went down pretty well. Saturday afternoon we travelled to Deva but we wouldn’t be playing the game until 7pm on Sunday so we had a long day of waiting around. The hotel was situated amongst some of the most picturesque parts of Romania and so in the morning we took a walk around, it’s now the middle of October but during the day I’m still able to wear a t-shirt, it’s that warm. Just before we left for the game, we had our lunch and pre match massages.

Both myself and Andy were in the squad again, it was a game with no real pressure as we weren’t the favourites. Deva is a big money team in the league and all their players have great technical ability, they also have 3 players currently in the Romanian International set up. The game started well for us, we took a 1 – 0 lead and could have had a couple more, and then we were hit by 4 goals in 4 minutes after some terrible defensive lapses. We managed to get one back just before half time and went in 4 – 2 down. At the start of the 2nd half we failed to take some glorious chances and went further behind, 6 – 2. We then rallied to 6 – 4 but never really got any closer with the final whistle leaving the score at 7 – 5. The team was disappointed to lose, mainly because we know we had great chances and we gave away some very silly goals.

Wet set off back straight after the game but not getting back to Odorhei until 3 am, we then had Monday off and are not training again until Tuesday evening. It’s International week again this week, with Romania playing a couple of games against Moldova, it means it’ll be quiet with our head coach and 3 of the players away on duty.

Next weeks game is against Eurolines, a typical ‘footballing’ futsal team, they have some decent players but don’t play with any Futsal know-how. Hopefully it will mean a return to winning ways for us."