Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Ryan Scicluna 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.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Zabbar St. Patrick this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Marked 5.29. Nothing he attempted worked and by the hour mark he had stopped attempting much, which is the part a manager notices rather than the mistakes.
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Zabbar St. Patrick will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Zabbar St. Patrick can pretend not to have heard.
Fee agreed, terms agreed, medical booked. Shaisen Attard will be somebody else’s player by the weekend, and around Zabbar St. Patrick the goodbyes have quietly begun.
There is no worse way to lose a footballer. Shaisen Attard 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.
Not a run of form — an actual step up, held for months. At 23 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.
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.
Bruno Figueiredo 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.
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.