15 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. Blackpool lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
Centre-halves are allowed forward twice a season and are judged on what they do when they get there. Cameron McGeehan scored, was marked 7.63, and got back before anybody noticed he had gone.
A season average of 7.00 at an age when most of his year group are still in the youth team. Blackpool know what they have, and so, by now, does everybody else.
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.
Successful dribbles: 17. He went past people as if he had been told there was a prize for it, and by the end the full-back had stopped pretending to try.
Somebody else has been better, the manager has said so with a team sheet, and there is no argument to be had. He will get the shirt back the only way it can be got back.
The words a physio says slowly. 24 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.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Blackpool can pretend not to have heard.
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.
Squad8 Mar 2027
Words at Blackpool training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Ayoub Aleesami 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.
“We keep meeting, and we keep leaving the room with the same numbers we walked in with.” Another round of talks at Blackpool, another week without a signature from Grant Smith.
Successful dribbles: 15. He went past people as if he had been told there was a prize for it, and by the end the full-back had stopped pretending to try.
In brief
Player ratingsNobody on the pitch touched Josh Bowler
The words a physio says slowly. 33 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.
Player ratings1 Mar 2027
Up for the corner, and Jordan Brown delivers — 7.33
Centre-halves are allowed forward twice a season and are judged on what they do when they get there. Jordan Brown scored, was marked 7.33, and got back before anybody noticed he had gone.
At 21 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.
A 1‑0 win over Wycombe Wanderers, earned rather than given, and the sort of afternoon that sends everyone home talking about next week instead of this one.
“I have tried. I have really tried, and every day I wake up in the wrong place.” Nobody at Blackpool can coach that out of a man, and nobody there is pretending to.
“We keep meeting, and we keep leaving the room with the same numbers we walked in with.” Another round of talks at Blackpool, another week without a signature from Cameron McGeehan.
The one version of being left out a player cannot argue with, and the one he takes worst. Somebody else has been better and the team sheet says so, in public, every week until it changes.
The words a physio says slowly. 42 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.
A defender on the scoresheet, which happens rarely enough that everybody in the ground remembers who took the corner. 1 for him, and a mark of 7.68 for the rest of it.
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 was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Blackpool this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
“The supporters are entitled to be angry. So am I. We will put it right.” 1‑2, a manager saying the necessary things, and a dressing room that heard a different version of them.
“Thirty minutes, door closed, everything said. We shook hands after.” Whatever was in the room stayed in the room, and Leighton Clarkson trained the next morning like a man with less to carry.