105 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Kryvbas lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Two goals and a mark of 8.39 to go with them. Strikers are judged on afternoons like this one and remembered for far fewer of them than people imagine.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Kryvbas can pretend not to have heard.
Fee agreed, terms agreed, medical booked. Artem Dudarenko will be somebody else’s player by the weekend, and around Kryvbas the goodbyes have quietly begun.
It is not a grievance and it is not a demand: he wants to play continental football, and he has stopped hiding it. Whether Kryvbas can give him that is a question about the club, not about him.
Footballers are asked about their boyhood club so often that nobody listens to the answer. Oleksandr Roshchynskyi has just signed for Kryvbas, and for once the answer mattered.
34 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Kryvbas lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Kryvbas this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
It is not a grievance and it is not a demand: he wants to play continental football, and he has stopped hiding it. Whether Kryvbas can give him that is a question about the club, not about him.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Yvan Dibango was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
“Thirty minutes, door closed, everything said. We shook hands after.” Whatever was in the room stayed in the room, and Oleh Ocheretko trained the next morning like a man with less to carry.
A bone, which is the one injury with a calendar attached. Kryvbas will name a return date and, unusually for this business, will probably be right about it.
Yvan Dibango 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.
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 Giovany Herbert is on it.
He asked about his future and was given an answer with minutes in it. The manager has now made a promise in a building where promises are remembered, and the clock on it has started.
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 Kryvbas that is a harder question to answer.