27 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. Artigas lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
0‑5 to Albion, and it was every bit as bad as the number suggests. There are defeats you argue about and defeats you apologise for; this was the second kind.
5 matches, no goals, and a training ground that has tried everything. It will end — droughts always do — but nobody at Artigas can tell you which week it ends in.
Diego López 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.
25 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. Artigas lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
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 club pays most of what it earns to its players. Paying nearly all of it is a different arrangement, and it has ended the same way every time it has been tried.
Rodrigo Cabrera is 37 and has run out of things to prove. What he has left is where to stand, when to slow it down and what to say at half-time, and none of that is on a fitness chart.
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.
Some afternoons a goalkeeper is the whole of the defence. 8 saves, several of them the kind nobody expects to see made, and ten outfield players who owe him a drink.
Rodrigo Pastorini 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.
There is no fee, no unveiling and no agent on the steps. Andres Hernandez has been at this club since he was a boy and is now, formally, one of the first-team squad — which for a local readership beats any signing of any size.
Clubs spend fortunes looking for players and occasionally find one down the corridor. Santiago Pellistri is that, and the reception he gets on his first appearance will be different in kind from the one any signing receives.
The academy exists for exactly this morning. Brian Cabrera has come through every age group the club runs and has now been handed a senior number, and the people who coached him at twelve will be the proudest in the building.
The academy exists for exactly this morning. Ivan Coates has come through every age group the club runs and has now been handed a senior number, and the people who coached him at twelve will be the proudest in the building.
He is doing things on a Saturday afternoon that nobody around him can answer, which is flattering for about one season and a problem after that. Artigas will not keep him by pretending otherwise.