Aimé Omgba 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.
The injury that keeps coming back, keeps being rushed back from, and quietly costs more careers than the dramatic ones. 14 days is the estimate; the honest figure depends on whether anybody is patient.
Another week, another link, another denial nobody quite believes. Waasland-Beveren know the market decides these things, not the back pages — but the back pages are louder.
Nothing in writing and nothing in public: a word about playing time, given face to face at Waasland-Beveren. The team sheets over the next month will show whether it was worth having.
Chris Lokesa has done the arithmetic and does not like the answer. Nothing corrodes a squad faster, and no club has ever solved it by explaining the wage structure to a footballer.
Aimé Omgba 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.
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.
Every squad has one of these fixtures for somebody every season. This one is Chris Lokesa’s: the club that knew him first, the supporters who will decide in the first minute whether to applaud, and Waasland-Beveren needing him to play as if none of it matters.
Another week, another link, another denial nobody quite believes. Waasland-Beveren know the market decides these things, not the back pages — but the back pages are louder.
He asked about his future and was given an answer with minutes in it. The manager has now made a promise in a building where promises are remembered, and the clock on it has started.
“It had gone on long enough. I would rather have it out than leave it sitting there.” Ten minutes behind a closed door at Waasland-Beveren, and both men came out saying it was fine.
In brief
Loan watchThe goals keep arriving from Hüseyin Ertürk’s exile
Position 3, 46 points, and the result everyone checks first is now theirs. The word is still not being said around the ground, which is how you know everyone is thinking it.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Fréderic Soelle Soelle is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.
Sieben Dewaele and a teammate said things this week that will take longer than a week to unsay. It was not about football, and both of them play on Saturday.
There is a particular warmth a ground reserves for a 21-year-old it feels ownership of. Fréderic Soelle Soelle has it now, and everything he does for the rest of his time here will be measured against the goodwill he was handed for free.
A squad rebuilt inside one window pays for it in a currency nobody budgets for. The football is not worse than the sum of the players; it is worse than the sum of the players who have played together before.
A player who expected to start watched it instead. The manager will call it a decision for the team; Kurt Abrahams will call it something else in private.
Aimé Omgba 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.
“I was told straight, and I would rather have it straight.” The manager at Waasland-Beveren has been clear about where Guillaume De Schryver stands, which is more than many ever get.
It is a small honour and it is not nothing: somebody watched every match in the division and decided that Arno Verschueren was the best thing in any of them.
Another week, another link, another denial nobody quite believes. Waasland-Beveren know the market decides these things, not the back pages — but the back pages are louder.