“The easiest signature of my career.” Eduard Chioveanu and Astra agree another 4 years, and the manager can plan around him rather than about him.
Squad8 Feb 2027
Keita Endo falls out with a teammate over standards
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Astra this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
“I watch every Astra game from here. That says everything about where my head is.” The loan at Aris Thessaloniki runs its course, but his heart never made the trip.
5 signings in three months. Every one of them may be an upgrade and the team can still be worse for a while, which is the part of a rebuild that never appears in the transfer-window verdicts.
“Things were said to me before I signed. I am not going to repeat them, but I remember all of them.” Astra have not answered, which is an answer of sorts.
The name of Claudiu Stanciu has come up in conversations Astra were not part of. Nothing formal, nothing signed — but nothing about it accidental either.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Astra this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
6 without a win now, and the ground has developed the special quiet of a crowd that expects the worst. One scrappy 1-0 would cure most of it; that is the maddening part.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Astra this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. George Puscas is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.
The words a physio says slowly. 14 days is what the club will announce and everybody who has heard this diagnosis before knows the number is the least of it: the knee comes back before the player does.
The offer from Chornomorets for Igor Machado was heard out and sent back the same day. First bids are rarely meant to succeed; they are meant to find out how loudly the door closes.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. George Puscas is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Astra this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
17 defensive actions and a clean sheet at the end of them. A defender's afternoon can only be told by what did not happen, which is why nobody makes a highlights package out of one and every manager in the division would take it.
15 times he got in the way of something. Centre-halves get written about when they make mistakes and ignored when they do not, so an afternoon like this needs saying out loud: he is the reason the scoreline reads as it does.
The crowd waited for a goal that never came. Pandurii defended in numbers and left with what they came for, and the two sides could be playing still without troubling a scorer.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Astra can pretend not to have heard.
George Puscas was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Keita Endo is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.