61 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. Ventspils lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
Player ratings7 May 2029
Cheick Kanté, 20, plays like he has been here for years — 7.99
A mark of 7.99 means one thing beside a twenty-nine-year-old's name and something else entirely beside a 20-year-old's. Nobody at the ground needed telling which this was.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Ventspils this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Liepaja made Ventspils work for it, but the scoreboard read 1‑0 at the end and the table does not ask how.
Squad7 May 2029
Words at Ventspils training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Alvis Jaunzems 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.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Ventspils this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
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 Ventspils 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.
“I have done everything asked of me in training and it has not changed a thing on a Saturday.” The most familiar complaint in football, and one Ventspils will have to answer with minutes or with a transfer.
Two hours a week with a tutor, which is the least glamorous thing at Ventspils and the one that decides whether a foreign signing is still here in two years.
In brief
The dugoutThe manager plants his flag on Sem Morales
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Ventspils this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Alvis Jaunzems was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
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 Akin Odimayo is on it.
He is not being dropped. There is simply nowhere in the formation Ventspils are playing to put a man who does what he does, which is a harder thing to be told than any team sheet.
The words a physio says slowly. 76 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.
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.