Sports weekend
Romania’s national rugby side is making its debut in an international competition at the end of this week
Florin Orban, 03.07.2026, 13:45
Romania’s rugby side is these days training in Chile’s capital, Santiago, for a debut in the new international competition World Rugby Nations Cup. “The Oaks” as the Romanian side has been dubbed, will be taking on the Chilean side at 18 hours local time, when in Romania will be one o’clock in the morning on Sunday.
The first days of their training campaign in South America were devoted to overcoming the jetlag and the issues related to lower temperatures as Chile is in winter now and temperatures could drop to zero at night.
Their training focused on various strategies, such as piles, attacks and other schemes to be used in the match against Chile. The team’s technical staff and players themselves have hopefully learnt their lesson after the failures they experienced one year ago during their tournament in South America. We recall that at that time, ‘the Oaks’ came a cropper to Chile 40-16, to Uruguay 70-8 and to Argentina‘s second side 52-14.
We continue with football as not only our rugby players are training, but also our footballers. The Romanian football side, FCSB, is presently training in Venray, the Netherlands until July 10th. On Sunday they will be taking on Belgian side Union Saint-Gilloise, whose lineup includes their former skipper, Darius Olaru.
CFR Cluj, Romania’s other representative in the preliminaries of the continental competition Conference League, is training in Slovenia. CFR coached by their new headcoach Antonio Folha arrived there on June 28th and their training campaign in that country will last until July 10th. On Saturday, CFR will be up against local side Olimpija Ljubljana. After three days, on Tuesday, to be precise, they will be playing Armenian side Noah, while on July 9th they will be taking on Karpati Lviv, of Ukraine.
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