Emanuel Mammana 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.
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 Vélez 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.
1 months left, and both sides know what that means: every week without a signature, the fee Vélez could ask drops and the wages Matías Pellegrini can ask rise.
At 18 he is doing things this season that he could not do last season, and doing them every week. Form comes and goes; this has stayed long enough to be called something else.
Emanuel Mammana 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 chances are being made and something is happening between the making and the finishing. 4 matches now, and the anxiety in the ground arrives a little earlier every week.
There is a version of every career where the player ends up somewhere he chose rather than somewhere that chose him. Valentín Rodríguez is living that version at Vélez, and it tends to show in the first month.
The paperwork is done long before the player is. Gonzalo Errecalde has agreed terms to come here when his current deal runs out, which means Vélez have spent a summer's transfer budget on a phone call.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Santiago Cáseres 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.
Something was said to Elías Gómez and then it happened. In this industry that passes for remarkable, and the dressing room noticed faster than any supporter could.