The deal with La Luz is done in every sense but the one that puts him on the pitch. Nothing goes wrong at this stage, except on the occasions when it does.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Durazno this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Durazno have made the call to Montevideo City Torque. No fee, a share of the wages, and a spare shirt in the position where the squad has been thinnest all season.
Nobody at Durazno will say this on the record and the team sheets have been saying it for weeks. There is a small group in every squad who get picked when the fixture is difficult, and he has joined it.
The registration window is open and the phone has started. Between now and the deadline this club will be linked with forty players and sign three, which is the usual ratio.
He looks like a man who lives here now rather than one who is working here. It took most of a season, and at Durazno the difference is visible from the back of the stand.
Iván Pérez 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.
Nobody at Durazno will say this on the record and the team sheets have been saying it for weeks. There is a small group in every squad who get picked when the fixture is difficult, and he has joined it.
In brief
The dugoutJuan Pablo Paz asks for a word with the manager
Iván Pérez 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 thought about how hard another man trains, and Agustín Rodríguez was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
Nobody at Durazno will say this on the record and the team sheets have been saying it for weeks. There is a small group in every squad who get picked when the fixture is difficult, and he has joined it.
Gastón Alvite 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.
Clubs spend fortunes looking for players and occasionally find one down the corridor. Camilo Rossi is that, and the reception he gets on his first appearance will be different in kind from the one any signing receives.
There is no fee, no unveiling and no agent on the steps. Jonathan De Arrascaeta has been at this club since he was a boy and is now, formally, one of the first-team squad — which for a local readership beats any signing of any size.
Everybody saw it before anybody said it. At 37 the numbers say 3 points down on what he was, and the question for Durazno is how to handle a man they owe a great deal.
Every manager keeps a short list in his head of the men he wants on the pitch when the stakes rise, and it is never published. The team sheets for the big afternoons say César Horst is on it.