The Junior Chronicle
Squad20 Jan 2031
Franklin Mosquera damages knee ligaments — 17 days out
The words a physio says slowly. 17 days is what the club will announce and everybody who has heard this diagnosis before knows the number is the least of it: the knee comes back before the player does.
Market20 Jan 2031
Jermein Peña has his eye on Europe
It is not a grievance and it is not a demand: he wants to play continental football, and he has stopped hiding it. Whether Junior can give him that is a question about the club, not about him.
Squad20 Jan 2031
Tempers go at Junior
Cristian Barrios 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.
Squad20 Jan 2031
Yoshan Valois 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.
Squad20 Jan 2031
Junior count the cost of losing David Martínez
25 days, the scan says, and scans are kinder than reality. The fixtures in that window have just become somebody else’s job.
The dugout20 Jan 2031
When it matters, Cristian Barrios plays
It is never announced and it is entirely visible: the biggest afternoons of the season keep containing him. A press box works this out long before anybody at the club confirms a word of it.
The dugout20 Jan 2031
Jorge Rivaldo knocks on the manager’s door
“Thirty minutes, door closed, everything said. We shook hands after.” Whatever was in the room stayed in the room, and Jorge Rivaldo trained the next morning like a man with less to carry.
Market20 Jan 2031
The Jean Carlos Pestaña talk will not go away
Another week, another link, another denial nobody quite believes. Junior know the market decides these things, not the back pages — but the back pages are louder.
Looking ahead20 Jan 2031
Jean Carlos Pestaña faces his old club
Aguilas Doradas next, and one man in the Junior dressing room knows their training ground better than his own. The reception will tell him what they thought of him.
In brief
- The dugout Jannenson Sarmiento has been promised minutes
- Market Junior put Yhormar Hurtado up for sale
- Looking ahead Home comforts ahead for Junior