A bad atmosphere can be waited out. A group of people meeting afterwards to decide what to do about it cannot, and everybody in the building knows which stage this is.
The words a physio says slowly. 79 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.
Position 14 and 28 points, and the table gets read bottom-up in this part of town. The calendar has stopped being a schedule and started being a countdown.
“Things were said to me before I signed. I am not going to repeat them, but I remember all of them.” Pineto have not answered, which is an answer of sorts.
Fee agreed, terms agreed, medical booked. Francesco Marone will be somebody else’s player by the weekend, and around Pineto the goodbyes have quietly begun.
Erdis Kraja 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.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Filippo D'Andrea was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
Pineto had done everything except persuade the man himself. He stays at Genoa, and the manager goes back to the drawing board with the money still in the bank.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Filippo D'Andrea was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Pineto this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Nobody will confirm it and the team sheets confirm it every week. One error has bought him a spell as second choice that is already longer than the error deserved.
“It is not the end of the world and it is not good enough. Both of those are true.” The manager, after a 0‑0 draw, said the honest thing and then went to say it again inside.
In brief
The dugoutThe plan did not have a place for Allan Alencar
Every squad has one of these fixtures for somebody every season. This one is Luca Lombardi’s: the club that knew him first, the supporters who will decide in the first minute whether to applaud, and Pineto needing him to play as if none of it matters.
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 Giovanni Di Renzo trained the next morning like a man with less to carry.
A conversation in the manager’s office, and a commitment that came out of it. Promises like that are cheap to make and expensive to break, and Simone Ienco has written the date down.
The shrug has gone, the language is coming, and he now argues in training like somebody who expects to be here next year. Half a signing's value is this and none of it appears on a fee.