We had a training yesterday, and for the day after a game it
was ridiculously difficult. Things
started off normally with a simple warm-up and about 25 minutes of 5v2. For those who don’t know, 5v2 is a simple
possession game that is now the biggest thing ever with teams now for some
reason. I personally hate the game, but
it’s a laid back game and can be fun at times.
Typically it’s just a time killer for me. It’s easier than running all over the
place. After that though things got
tough.
I should make clear that even though I’ve spent all of my
time the past month around Swedish people, I don’t understand a word of what’s
being said at training. I’ve learned
some key words specific to training, but in general everything’s that is said
goes right past me. For that reason I
had no idea until it was happening that we were running fitness. We split into two groups: the guys who played
60+ minutes the day before and those who played less. My group (60+) had to run to midfield and
back and the other group had to run that twice for each rep. I assumed we’d do 4-5, but instead we did
12! By six or seven I was gassed and by
12 I was barely holding my head up.
After the fitness we split into two teams and played 6v6 to
full-sized goals in 4-minute games. My
team didn’t do great, but I scored as many goals as anyone so I couldn’t
complain. My team was playing with a
youth team goalkeeper which didn’t help our cause either. That was the end of training for the guys who
played big minutes the day before, but for the rest of the guys there was more
fitness in the cards. I didn’t hang
around to watch that.
One interesting thing is that in the past few days I’ve
started to hear my first rumblings of dissent in the team. This is by no means unusual: In Baltimore we lived to complain and
Harrisburg wasn’t much different. What
is interesting though in this case is that it’s not people complaining about
playing time or style, but instead about the management of the team. Any player would be annoyed by having such a
difficult training the morning after a match.
It’s just that this confusion in training intensities seems to come at
random. I assumed before that the coach
was giving the guys some explanation and I was missing it because it was in
Swedish, but from what I’m hearing the guys have no clue as to what each day
holds. Maybe that’s good for some teams,
but clearly it’s frustrating this team.
I should be clear that I don’t think this is a problem, just
interesting. I thought this team was
more contented than the teams I played on in USL, but obviously they’re
not. The City Islanders were the 2nd
place team in their league with us complaining the whole time so why couldn’t
ESK do the same or better?
After training I went on the promised walk. Well actually first I lifted weights but that’s
too boring for even this blog. I took
some pictures on the walk and I posted them here just to show you a bit of Enkoping. The field you see is our training
ground. It’s about 1200 meters from the
stadium and we drive there most days for training. There’s a training pitch at Enkoping, but it’s
grass and if we trained on it now, it would be ruined in a month. We have to wait for the grass to grow in and
for that it needs to get warmer.
Hopefully that happens soon.
Anyway my walk was nice. I went
around the entire town of Enkoping in an hour, so you can kind of get an idea
of how small it is. There’s a lot more
forest area than I thought, but that’s a good thing because it will make my
longer runs around town more interesting.
I did nothing else the rest of the day except watch Netflix and
Hulu. I’ve started watching Battlestar
Galatica so that should take up about 30 hours over the next few weeks. I’m really cool, I know (You can’t argue
that. You’re reading my blog!).
Today I’ve done literally nothing other than lift weights
about 9 hours ago. The team has today
and tomorrow off. Normally that would be
an invite to travel around and visit somewhere, but I have almost no money
whatsoever. I have no bank account in
Sweden, but I only have about $200 so it’s not like I need a super safe place
to store my stockpile of cash. As a
result I can’t go to Stockholm or Oslo or Copenhagen like I otherwise would
have done with essentially 4 days off (we trained Friday morning and our next
training is Monday evening). I also can’t
go over to Fabian’s house because he, Daniel and Robert are all out of town for
the weekend. I took this video in the
town today. It's quite bumpy because I was walking so don't watch if you're prone to get a headache from that sort of thing. I hope you realize that in
making these videos I look like an absolute creep or crazy person to everyone
around. I make that sacrifice for you! I thought about going to the bar tonight, but
I’m not nearly cool (or uncool) enough to go to a bar/club by myself. The fact that I don’t speak a word of Swedish
doesn’t help, though I’m sure anyone I’d talk to would speak English. Fortunately for me, Netflix exists so the
time has flown by. And now I’m streaming
a Barcelona game so life is good.
Besides, beers here are $10 a pop in Sweden so I’m saving myself some
misery by staying home.
I’m going to profile some of the players on the team here
this week leading up to our season opener on the 16th. It will be good for the people who read this
to have a face to put with the names I rattle off all the time. The hardest thing will be getting the guys to
pose for pictures! I’m kidding, of
course, as all Swedish guys not-so-secretly want to be male models and dress
the part every single day. I will have to work though to
get a photo of our assistant coach.
He looks like what the dad would look like in a pamphlet about Swedish
people. When I get the picture you’ll
understand.
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