This is not rotation. Juan Cruz Careaga has not been in the manager's plans for some time, and nobody at Canadian is pretending otherwise.
Boardroom24 Jul 2028
Deadline passes with 1 signed and 8 gone
That is the business done at Canadian until the window opens again. Whether it was enough will be answered on Saturdays rather than in a column, and the first Saturday is close.
Successful dribbles: 22. He went past people as if he had been told there was a prize for it, and by the end the full-back had stopped pretending to try.
Everybody saw it before anybody said it. At 39 the numbers say 3 points down on what he was, and the question for Canadian is how to handle a man they owe a great deal.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Diego Tissera was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
Successful dribbles: 30. He went past people as if he had been told there was a prize for it, and by the end the full-back had stopped pretending to try.
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.
There was one mistake and it ended in the net. Defenders are judged on the worst thing they did rather than on the eighty-nine minutes either side of it, which is unfair and is also the job.
“A point is a point and I will take it, but we should have had all three.” Carlos Martinez after the 1‑1 draw, and the sentence every manager in the country said at some stage this weekend.
“Thirty minutes, door closed, everything said. We shook hands after.” Whatever was in the room stayed in the room, and Ernesto Ocampo trained the next morning like a man with less to carry.
A shoot-out is remembered by its ending, and this one ends with Jeremías Vargas: 2 kept out, and a set of supporters who will describe every one of them for the next twenty years.
Plaza Colonia go through and Canadian go home, 2‑2 the scoreline that did it. The dressing room will call the league the priority now, because that is what dressing rooms say.
The hardest thing about being 21 in a senior side is that nobody makes allowances. Enzo Maidana did not need any: 7.71, and he looked the most comfortable man on the pitch.
David Drocco 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.
There is a figure at which a wage bill stops being ambitious and becomes the reason nothing else is possible, and this club has reached it. Nothing is left over for a transfer, a stand or a rainy afternoon.
A point taken on 125 minutes is worth exactly one point and considerably more than that to a dressing room. This side does not stop, which is a reputation worth more than the result.
The team sheet says it in public every week until it changes. The only version of being dropped a footballer cannot argue with, and the one he takes hardest.
Every footballer has an answer to the question about his boyhood club, and most of them never get to act on it. Enzo Maidana has, at Canadian, and the first month will show what that does to a man.
Everything was agreed with another club and then the doctor spoke. Canadian have walked away from a signing on the advice of somebody who never saw him play, which is how it is supposed to work.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Yisak Gómez was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
Facundo Rolón is 18, and Canadian have signed him for the player he will be rather than the one he is. The first team can wait; the point of a deal like this is the years it buys.
Juan Cruz Careaga arrives at 33 with nothing left to prove and plenty left to pass on. Legs are a young man's currency; knowing where to stand never ages.