Rocco Vicol 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.
Nobody at Grodig will say this on the record and the team sheets have been saying it for weeks. There is a small group in every squad who get picked when the fixture is difficult, and he has joined it.
In brief
SquadHenry Johnson falls out with a teammate over standards
The board’s statement ran to three sentences and one of them mentioned results. Sergio Álvarez has managed long enough to translate: win soon, or the next statement is shorter.
The official line will be that it was routine. It was not routine, the timing says so, and every person in that room knows what the next bad result costs.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Grodig this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad4 May 2037
Words at Grodig training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Henry Johnson 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.
Nobody at Grodig will say this on the record and the team sheets have been saying it for weeks. There is a small group in every squad who get picked when the fixture is difficult, and he has joined it.
It has stopped being a mood in the stands and started being something organised. Boards can ignore a bad atmosphere for a long time; they cannot ignore this stage of it for very long at all.
92 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Grodig lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Grodig will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.