Everything was agreed until it was not, and Alphonce Msanga reports back to Shamakhi with a summer to forget. Neither club is saying who walked away from the table.
The clubs have agreed terms, and what remains is formality: a medical, a photograph, a signature. Nobody at Shamakhi is pretending he will be back in the shirt.
“Some mornings you wake up and you are still a long way from everything you know.” It is not the football and it never was; Shamakhi are dealing with a man who wants a different country.
Squad30 Jul 2029
Rüfat Abbasov 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.
Not now, not at any price the club was prepared to say out loud. Mika have kept their man, and Shamakhi go back to a list with one name crossed off it.
Müşviq Nadirov 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.
Words at Shamakhi training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Rüfat Abbasov is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.
Matheus Melo 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.
7 new signings in one window. Every one may be an upgrade and the side can still be worse for a while, which is the part of a rebuild the verdicts never mention.
It has been denied twice and printed three times, which is the usual arithmetic. Until Rüfat Abbasov signs something — a contract at Shamakhi or anywhere else — this column belongs to him.
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 Habib İsmayilov is on it.
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.
Diogo Balau 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.
At 20 he is doing things this season that he could not do last season, and doing them every week. Form comes and goes; this has stayed long enough to be called something else.
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.
Nobody will confirm this and nothing else explains the last month of selections. A costly error buys a player a period of being second choice that is always longer than the error was.
“It had gone on long enough. I would rather have it out than leave it sitting there.” Ten minutes behind a closed door at Shamakhi, and both men came out saying it was fine.
A year in and the language has not come, the city has not opened up, and he eats alone more often than anybody at Shamakhi would like to admit. It is showing on Saturdays.
The shirt still fits. Abdulla Seydəhmedov is back at Shamakhi, and half the ground remembers him in these colours already. Some signings need selling to the town; this one sold itself.
Diogo Balau 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 footballer has an answer to the question about his boyhood club, and most of them never get to act on it. Ivan Tikhomirov has, at Shamakhi, and the first month will show what that does to a man.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Rüfat Abbasov was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
“I pick players who do the work. All of it.” No name was spoken; every camera still turned to Edqar Adilxanov, and the manager let it.
Squad13 Mar 2028
12 new faces, and Shamakhi are still learning each other
A squad rebuilt inside one window pays for it in a currency nobody budgets for. The football is not worse than the sum of the players; it is worse than the sum of the players who have played together before.