February 28:
Today was supposed to be my first payday in
Finland/Europe. My contract with Haka
was slated to pay me $2150 per month after tax + a free apartment. Maybe MYPA will pay me for the week I’ve been
here? Lol I’m not holding my breath on
that one. Anyways…
I don’t really want to go much into the trainings here but
there are a couple things I’ve got to get off my chest and since I’m absolutely
sure no one in Myllykoski reads this (or much anyone outside of my family), I
can say what I want. First, our
trainings have been 75% intrasquad scrimmages.
That’s fine, nothing wrong there I guess, but we only have 20 guys. That means that we play 10v10 on an enormous
field. The result is something closer to
basketball than soccer. One team sends
six attackers versus four defenders in a huge wave. They either score, kick behind for a goal
kick, get dispossessed or have their shot saved by the goalkeeper. Literally regardless of what happens, the
other team immediately begins a counterattack the other way. It’s like this team is coached by Paul
Westphal and Mike D’Antoni. This is a
ridiculous way to play the scrimmages because in the end nobody gets better at
all. In the match the team didn’t make
10 consecutive passes at any time, yet in the training we don’t try to pass, we
try to run up and down the field as fast as possible. I wish the coach would say something but
maybe that’s what he’s looking for.
There’s a reason why he’s got a head coaching job and I have no job. Maybe I shouldn’t be complaining since I get
breakaways every single practice and score every practice. If this team had more than one player signed
who could score, then this approach could actually work. I guess I’ll have to be that guy.
Second, we have a training program that makes absolutely no
sense. We had two medium difficulty
training sessions on Monday, one physical training today (Tuesday) at the
clubhouse, tomorrow (Wednesday) is off, then we train twice again on Thursday
and once on Friday before playing Saturday.
It seems that we could find a more consistent schedule, especially since
each training requires a 20km drive to the turf field. That’s it for my soccer rambling.
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People here seem to just not care about the weather at
all. I’ve been having allergy problems
since Saturday, but I refuse to go to the pharmacy today because it’s snowing
like the world’s about to end. It’s only
4:30pm but it must have snowed close to a foot already today. However, I keep looking outside and see
people walking their bear-dogs. Side
note: all the dogs here have a hilarious amount of fur. Every single dog looks like some long lost
four legged creature from the Ice Age that you’d see at the Smithsonian. One lady walked by with two dogs that must
have weighed 70 pounds each and looked like wooly mammoths. She could just have easily have ridden those
things around town.
Tomorrow I will venture into central Kouvola, the most urban
area around. I’ll be heading down with
two trialists who are staying here with me, Vili and Kennny. Vili is from Finland and has his car here so
we’ll make the 20km drive into town and have a nice day. I’ll take some pictures!
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