A brace, and Gastón Lodico takes the afternoon — 8.99
There is a particular kind of quiet from an away end watching one man score twice. Gastón Lodico provided it, and the 8.99 beside his name is if anything generous to everybody else.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Instituto this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Ask anyone on the way out what separated the sides and you will get one name: Gastón Lodico. 3‑2 against Central Córdoba SdE, and the applause at the whistle was mostly his.
Every club in football pays most of what it earns to its players. Paying nearly all of it is a different arrangement, and it has ended the same way every time somebody has tried it.
7 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.
30 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.
At 34 he is supposed to be managing his minutes. Instead he was marked 9.15 and looked, for ninety minutes, exactly like the player everybody remembers.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Instituto this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
It is never announced and it is entirely visible: the biggest afternoons of the season keep containing him. A press box works this out long before anybody at the club confirms a word of it.
31 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.
At 38 he is supposed to be managing his minutes. Instead he was marked 8.35 and looked, for ninety minutes, exactly like the player everybody remembers.
24 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.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Instituto this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
There is a figure at which a wage bill stops being ambitious and becomes the reason nothing else is possible, and this club has reached it. Nothing is left over for a transfer, a stand or a rainy afternoon.
2 in front and in complete control, and it finished with Gimnasia y Esgrima the happier side. There is no version of this afternoon that Instituto will enjoy reviewing.
At 34 he is supposed to be managing his minutes. Instead he was marked 8.98 and looked, for ninety minutes, exactly like the player everybody remembers.
Leeds United paid $1.8M and Instituto took it, which is the whole story in one sentence. The longer version involves a wage budget and will be told all season.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Instituto this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Successful dribbles: 21. There is a particular sort of despair on a full-back's face by the seventieth minute, and it was on display.
Squad17 Aug 2026
Manuel Roffo 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.
At 22 he is being sung about by people twice his age, which is an affection a signing has to earn over years and a local kid gets for turning up. It is also the hardest thing in football to live up to.