Brutal, unambiguous and, for all the horror of the moment, usually less career-shaped than the ligament everybody fears more. 120 days, a clean timeline, and a return date somebody can actually plan around.
48 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. JS Kabylie lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Fee agreed, terms agreed, medical booked. Walid Khermouche will be somebody else’s player by the weekend, and around JS Kabylie the goodbyes have quietly begun.
Mehdi Bourabia 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.
0‑1 to MC Oran, and no complaints worth printing. The performance asked for nothing more than it got.
Squad22 Mar 2027
Words at JS Kabylie training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Babacar Sarr 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.
9 attempts, none of them in. He got into the right places all afternoon, which is the hard part, and did the easy part badly — and that is the version of a bad day a manager can live with.
There were 9 saves in it, and at least three that had no business being saves at all. The ten outfield players owe him a drink and they know it.
Player ratings22 Feb 2027
A first appearance Oussama Haroun will want to forget — 5.62
Everybody's debut is one of two stories and this was the other one. 5.62, and the only consolation available is that nobody's career has ever been decided by ninety minutes in a shirt he had just been given.
Terms are settled between the clubs and the rest is paperwork and a photograph. Around JS Kabylie they have already started talking about him in the past tense.
Mehdi Bourabia 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.
Some afternoons a goalkeeper is the team. 6 saves, several of them the sort nobody expects to see stopped, and a scoreline that flatters everybody in front of him.
The clubs have agreed terms, and what remains is formality: a medical, a photograph, a signature. Nobody at JS Kabylie is pretending he will be back in the shirt.
There is no worse way to lose a footballer. Walid Khermouche has pre-agreed a move away, which means every appearance between now and June is made by a man the club can no longer sell, and somebody upstairs will be asked why the contract was allowed to get here.
Mehdi Bourabia 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.
There is no complaint available here and everybody involved knows it, which does not make the walk to the bench any shorter. Form is the only currency in football that cannot be borrowed against.
Sam Morsy 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.
Not a run of form — an actual step up, held for months. At 19 he is doing things at this level he could not do at the start of the season, and the coaching staff will tell you exactly which of them.
“I pick players who do the work. All of it.” No name was spoken; every camera still turned to Zineddine Belaïd, and the manager let it.
Squad5 Oct 2026
Arthur Bada has improved at 24, which nobody expected
Careers are supposed to plateau and then decline, and the players who ignore that are always the ones who were listening on the training ground. 3 points of it, over months, at an age where the direction normally only goes one way.
Successful dribbles: 33. There is a particular sort of despair on a full-back's face by the seventieth minute, and it was on display.
The terraces14 Sep 2026
The boos come down from three sides
“We pay for this every fortnight. The least we want is somebody who looks like he cares.” 10 of the 46 senior players walked off into it; the rest were not playing.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at JS Kabylie this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Not a run of form — an actual step up, held for months. At 21 he is doing things at this level he could not do at the start of the season, and the coaching staff will tell you exactly which of them.
A defender's mistake gets tidied up by somebody else; a goalkeeper's ends up in the net. He knew before the ball crossed the line, and so did everybody in the ground.