Terms are settled between the clubs and the rest is paperwork and a photograph. Around NK Varazdin they have already started talking about him in the past tense.
Anton Klaster and a teammate went at it, and not about football. Training grounds are small places and a long season makes them smaller.
Squad31 Dec 2035
Edgar Piloyan 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.
“It had gone on long enough. I would rather have it out than leave it sitting there.” Ten minutes behind a closed door at NK Varazdin, and both men came out saying it was fine.
Nobody at NK Varazdin 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.
A conversation in the manager’s office, and a commitment that came out of it. Promises like that are cheap to make and expensive to break, and Leon Jadek has written the date down.
“This is not anger. I have thought about it for months, and nothing that has happened lately changed my mind.” The request is on a desk at NK Varazdin, and it is not being withdrawn.
Terms are settled between the clubs and the rest is paperwork and a photograph. Around NK Varazdin they have already started talking about him in the past tense.
Footballers are asked about their boyhood club so often that nobody listens to the answer. Tobias Keller has just signed for NK Varazdin, and for once the answer mattered.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Anton Ivanov was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
David Brnada 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.
In brief
The dugoutThe manager makes an example of Sandali Condé
68 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. NK Varazdin lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
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.
The clubs have agreed terms, and what remains is formality: a medical, a photograph, a signature. Nobody at NK Varazdin is pretending he will be back in the shirt.
“This is not anger. I have thought about it for months, and nothing that has happened lately changed my mind.” The request is on a desk at NK Varazdin, and it is not being withdrawn.
“Things were said to me before I signed. I am not going to repeat them, but I remember all of them.” NK Varazdin have not answered, which is an answer of sorts.
Konrad Matuszewski 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.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Marko Bulat was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
Every footballer has an answer to the question about his boyhood club, and most of them never get to act on it. Nicusor Puscas has, at NK Varazdin, and the first month will show what that does to a man.
The words a physio says slowly. 85 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.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at NK Varazdin this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
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.
“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; NK Varazdin are dealing with a man who wants a different country.
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.
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 Fran Petković is on it.