A bone, which is the one injury with a calendar attached. Al-Riyadh will name a return date and, unusually for this business, will probably be right about 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 Al-Riyadh this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
The approach was made and the answer came back in a sentence. There is no number on the table because there was no number that would have been enough.
Squad22 Jul 2030
Words at Al-Riyadh training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Juan David Cabezas 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.
“Thirty minutes, door closed, everything said. We shook hands after.” Whatever was in the room stayed in the room, and Osama Al-Thumayri trained the next morning like a man with less to carry.
It has been denied twice and printed three times, which is the usual arithmetic. Until Marzouq Tambakti signs something — a contract at Al-Riyadh or anywhere else — this column belongs to him.
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 Dostonbek Tursunov is on it.
A bone, which is the one injury with a calendar attached. Al-Riyadh will name a return date and, unusually for this business, will probably be right about it.
The deal with Al-Khaleej is done in every sense but the one that puts him on the pitch. Nothing goes wrong at this stage, except on the occasions when it does.
Al-Riyadh asked and Al-Hilal said no without discussing a figure. It is the least ambiguous answer in football and the one clubs most often come back to test.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Al-Riyadh this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Everybody saw it before anybody said it. At 34 the numbers say 3 points down on what he was, and the question for Al-Riyadh is how to handle a man they owe a great deal.
The list is a quiet document with a loud meaning. Osama Al-Thumayri may talk to anybody who asks, and everybody at the club understands what that means.
Another week, another link, another denial nobody quite believes. Al-Riyadh know the market decides these things, not the back pages — but the back pages are louder.
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 Sattam Al-Shammari is on it.
Footballers are asked about their boyhood club so often that nobody listens to the answer. Saad Al-Mutairi has just signed for Al-Riyadh, and for once the answer mattered.
The manager has re-ordered his thinking and Khaled Al-Khathlan has come out of it lower. He will be told it is temporary, and the players who have heard that before will avoid his eye.
A year in and the language has not come, the city has not opened up, and he eats alone more often than anybody at Al-Riyadh would like to admit. It is showing on Saturdays.
It has been denied twice and printed three times, which is the usual arithmetic. Until Marzouq Tambakti signs something — a contract at Al-Riyadh or anywhere else — this column belongs to him.
Nobody at Al-Riyadh 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.
There is a particular kind of quiet from an away end watching one man score twice. Saad Al-Sharfa provided it, and the 8.68 beside his name is if anything generous to everybody else.
Fee agreed, terms agreed, medical booked. Jan Petek will be somebody else’s player by the weekend, and around Al-Riyadh the goodbyes have quietly begun.
Al-Nassr will keep picking him until June and will get nothing for him after it. Faisal Al-Essa has pre-agreed a move to Al-Riyadh, and the only people who lose in that arrangement are the ones who let the contract run down.
Khaled Al-Khathlan 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.
$4.3M is a serious amount of money and it does not play centre-forward. Everybody in the dressing room knows who used to be looked at when it went wrong.
The last thing about a transfer that is still about the player is his signature on his own terms, and it is there. Al-Ettifaq have lost him in all but the paperwork.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Al-Ettifaq can pretend not to have heard.
He is going to Al-Hilal, the club has $4.3M it did not have on Friday, and the phone-ins have already decided how they feel about that. Selling well and selling somebody they loved are not the same skill.
The offer from Al-Faisaly for Mohamed Benkhemassa was heard out and sent back the same day. First bids are rarely meant to succeed; they are meant to find out how loudly the door closes.
Georginio Wijnaldum 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 version of every career where the player ends up somewhere he chose rather than somewhere that chose him. Ashraf Magdy is living that version at Al-Ettifaq, and it tends to show in the first month.
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.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Al-Ettifaq can pretend not to have heard.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Al-Ettifaq 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 Abdullah Madu was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
6 new signings in one window. Every one may be an upgrade and the side can still be worse for a while, which is the part of a rebuild the verdicts never mention.
8 shut-outs in 27 games. A goalkeeper’s loan is judged on the afternoons when nothing happened at all, and Abdulbasit Hawsawi has been having a lot of them.
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.
“Thirty minutes, door closed, everything said. We shook hands after.” Whatever was in the room stayed in the room, and Saif Rashad trained the next morning like a man with less to carry.