“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 The request is on a desk at Lokeren, and it is not being withdrawn.
Ismail Azzaoui and a teammate went at it, and not about football. Training grounds are small places and a long season makes them smaller.
Squad28 Apr 2031
Aaron Seydel falls out with a teammate over standards
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.
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 Maksym Bukatyi is on it.
In brief
MarketThe clock does Dani Slory’s negotiating for him
45 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Lokeren lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Some afternoons a goalkeeper is the whole of the defence. 9 saves, several of them the kind nobody expects to see made, and ten outfield players who owe him a drink.
There is an age at which every good afternoon gets described as a throwback, which is unfair and also accurate. 7.88 at 34, and nobody on the pitch was better.
The name of Robbe Quirynen has come up in conversations Lokeren were not part of. Nothing formal, nothing signed — but nothing about it accidental either.
Ismail Azzaoui 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.
Lokeren asked and Sint-Truiden said no without discussing a figure. It is the least ambiguous answer in football and the one clubs most often come back to test.
75 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Lokeren lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
The offer went to Sint-Truiden this week and it is theirs to answer. First bids are rarely meant to succeed; they are meant to find out how loud the door closes.
“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 The request is on a desk at Lokeren, and it is not being withdrawn.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Lokeren this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Stanley Plasschaert is 22, and the version of him training now would not have got into the side he was in a year ago.
“Thirty minutes, door closed, everything said. We shook hands after.” Whatever was in the room stayed in the room, and David Bates trained the next morning like a man with less to carry.
In brief
The dugoutMaksym Bukatyi has become a man the manager trusts