The words a physio says slowly. 16 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.
23 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. Resistencia lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Resistencia this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
There is a version of every career where the player ends up somewhere he chose rather than somewhere that chose him. Richard Cabrera is living that version at Resistencia, and it tends to show in the first month.
Nobody at Resistencia 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.
Nobody sells a season ticket on a signing like this. Every manager who has been through a bad October wants one anyway, and Resistencia have gone and got theirs early.