After all, the job is not learned on a laptop

Daniel Pancu is the man who got the PRO license the hardest, he stayed for about 10 years, longer than a doctor through college, because there was a pandemic and he felt that he had to start coaching school at 19, after junior.

Here, in football, we have a special category of characters who disturb not because they are wrong, but because they say the things that the rest think in whispers, and Daniel Pancu definitely entered this select club with the series at CFR Cluj, a series which, if you read it dry, in numbers, means 8 matches without defeat, 6 victories in a row and 4 out of 4 this year.

If you read it correctly, in dressing room parlance, it means only one thing: a team that no longer looks like a group of players, but like a hungry pack. And the packs don't appear from beautifully drawn schemes with the marker on the board, you just saw in the match with FCSB how Pancone blackened the tactical board.

When you find the real locker room

Pancu said that the situation he found was indescribable, and in football this expression is not literature, it's a diagnosis: soft dressing room, zero reaction, footballers who enter the field with the mentality of “let this too pass”, that is, exactly the perfect soil for mediocrity, that warm place where nothing hurts anymore because you don't even hope for much.

This is actually where his credit goes, because he didn't change the system, he didn't invent football, he didn't discover some extraterrestrial pressure, but he did something much harder and much rarer: he changed the situation.

CFR won, as he says, with aggressiveness, but this aggressiveness is not just extra running, it's recovered pride, it's a reaction after a lost duel, it's the foul made in time, it's that look that says “today you don't leave here with points”, and these things don't come from the laptop, they come from the past of the man who runs the locker room. Look at Korenica, at Cordea, totally changed since Pancu came, they play eating the ground.

How to see the footballer

Here you can see Pancu the footballer, not the laboratory trainer. The man who sat through big locker rooms, who caught real football, real pressure, real coaches, who stole jobs by sitting next to them, not reading about them.

That kind of experience that cannot be certified, but is immediately felt by players with personality, because the footballer instantly smells if in front of him is a theorist or someone who has lived what he is talking about.

That's why Pancu joins the group and that's why, at the same time, he irritates in the offices and in the studios, because he has a major flaw in modern Romanian football: he doesn't know how to be diplomatic when the truth is ugly. He said uncomfortable things about the U21, about the young footballers, about the mentality, and he got angry, as if the role of the coach is to caress the pride, not to scratch it when needed. But it's exactly this kind of speech that builds locker rooms, not social media likes, which are for nothing.

Daniel Pancu, joy after Andrei Cordea's goal from FCSB – CFR Cluj // PHOTO: Ionuț Iordache (GSP.ro)

No concessions

When he talks about appointments and pulls out that “I wake them up from the cryosauna on Saturday and ask them who wants to play” line, the world hears the joke, but the players hear the message: there is no alibi. Yes, the schedule is crooked, yes, the opponents have an extra day, yes, it's unfair, but if you want Europe, then you endure the pace of Europe. It's a complaint that turns into a challenge, and that's the difference between a coach who makes excuses and one who raises the bar.

The matches with U Cluj and Rapid are not only about points, they are about status, about whether CFR is still that team that enters the field with the air of a participant in big competitions or remains one that tells the story of what it once was. And this series does something essential: it brings back the idea that it is possible. That not everything is closed. That it's not over.

Pancu did not perform miracles. He made something harder and rarer in our football, put pride in the locker room and raised the level of intolerance for mediocrity. And when you change that, the ranking starts to move almost as a consequence, not as a goal.

Maybe that's why it bothers, because it reminds, in a football full of explanations, that without nerve, without truth told straight and without a bit of good malice, no team gets anywhere, no matter how many beautiful presentations it has.