41 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. Mirandés lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
2 goals, and the second was the one that settled it. Marked 8.75, and he could have had a third with better luck at the near post.
Player ratings30 Apr 2029
Leandro Larroza, 21, plays like he has been here for years — 7.90
A mark of 7.90 means one thing beside a twenty-nine-year-old's name and something else entirely beside a 21-year-old's. Nobody at the ground needed telling which this was.
1 for Marcin Szpakowski, marked 7.84, and a centre-half's name in the part of the report he normally only reaches by mistake. He will not be allowed to forget it in the dressing room for a month.
Two of the goals had his name somewhere on them, which is the afternoon a manager wants from anybody asked to both create and finish. 7.83, and 2 involvements.
Everybody at Mirandés saw it before anybody said it, which is how this always goes. At 35 the decline is real and measurable — 3 points — and the only question left is how the club handles somebody it owes a great deal to.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Mirandés this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
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.
At 22 he is being sung about by people twice his age, which is an affection a signing has to earn over years and a local kid gets for turning up. It is also the hardest thing in football to live up to.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Josué Dorrio was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
Player ratings9 Apr 2029
Marco Carraro was on a different afternoon to everybody else
8.05. There are performances a supporter describes to somebody who was not there and cannot quite convey; this was one, and the number does not help either.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Mirandés this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Racing Ferrol left with the points after a 0‑1 defeat that will take some explaining on the terraces.
Squad12 Mar 2029
Josué Dorrio 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.
“The supporters are entitled to be angry. So am I. We will put it right.” 0‑1, a manager saying the necessary things, and a dressing room that heard a different version of them.
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.
“I did not come here to warm up in front of people.” He is out of contract eventually, he is old enough to count the weeks, and Mirandés will have to give him a reason to stay or an exit.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Ferro Carril Oeste can pretend not to have heard.
The general version of this complaint is that a player wants more. The specific version names the thing: he wants to walk out under floodlights against clubs from other countries, and he has stopped pretending otherwise.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Uriel Valdez 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.
“Thirty minutes, door closed, everything said. We shook hands after.” Whatever was in the room stayed in the room, and Ulises Yegros trained the next morning like a man with less to carry.
Nobody at Ferro Carril Oeste 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.