At 35 he is supposed to be managing his minutes. Instead he was marked 7.99 and looked, for ninety minutes, exactly like the player everybody remembers.
“This is not anger. I have thought about it for months, and nothing that has happened lately changed my mind.” The request is on a desk at Güemes, and it is not being withdrawn.
Marked 8.18 — the sort of number a correspondent writes down twice to be sure. Everything he tried came off, and what he did not try was not worth trying.
It happens to all of them and it is still the hardest paragraph a local paper has to write. 38 years old, 3 points down on where he was, and a body that has started charging interest on a career.
“The players deserve the credit. My job was easy today.” It was not, and everybody in the room knew it; after 2‑1, Leonardo Villalba could afford to be generous.
Somebody else has been better, the manager has said so with a team sheet, and there is no argument to be had. He will get the shirt back the only way it can be got back.
Leandro Finochietto 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.
Every squad has one of these fixtures for somebody every season. This one is Axel Bordón’s: the club that knew him first, the supporters who will decide in the first minute whether to applaud, and Güemes 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.
Nothing in writing and nothing in public: a word about playing time, given face to face at Güemes. The team sheets over the next month will show whether it was worth having.
Numbers do not stay secret in a dressing room and never have. He is not asking for more than he is worth; he is asking why somebody beside him is worth more, and at Güemes that is a harder question to answer.
“Things were said to me before I signed. I am not going to repeat them, but I remember all of them.” Güemes have not answered, which is an answer of sorts.
Leandro Finochietto 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.
Ask anyone on the way out what separated the sides and you will get one name: Juan Mendoza. 2‑1 against Quilmes, and the applause at the whistle was mostly his.
Every club in football pays most of what it earns to its players. Paying nearly all of it is a different arrangement, and it has ended the same way every time somebody has tried it.
16 signings in three months. Every one of them may be an upgrade and the team can still be worse for a while, which is the part of a rebuild that never appears in the transfer-window verdicts.
The dugout5 Oct 2026
The view from the dugout
“We controlled it. There were spells I did not like and we will look at them, but the group showed me something.” Leonardo Villalba, on a 2‑1 win that he was already picking apart on the walk to the press room.
Not a new contract, not a new number: a new place in the manager’s thinking, which is the only promotion in football that actually matters. Juan Mendoza has moved up it.