It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Potenza this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad16 Nov 2026
Words at Potenza training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Yuri Rocchetti 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.
“I was told straight, and I would rather have it straight.” The manager at Potenza has been clear about where Manuele Castorani stands, which is more than many ever get.
He is not being dropped. There is simply nowhere in the formation Potenza are playing to put a man who does what he does, which is a harder thing to be told than any team sheet.
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.
Every squad has one of these fixtures for somebody every season. This one is Jacopo Murano’s: the club that knew him first, the supporters who will decide in the first minute whether to applaud, and Potenza needing him to play as if none of it matters.
“It had gone on long enough. I would rather have it out than leave it sitting there.” Ten minutes behind a closed door at Potenza, and both men came out saying it was fine.
Out, 0‑4 to Frosinone, and the long argument about which of the small moments decided it. The league is all there is now, and everybody knows it.
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Potenza are taken apart by Frosinone — and the town wants answers
It finished 0-4. A cup exit is a disappointment; this was a public dismantling, and the difference between the two is the number of people who will still be talking about it in August.
Gianluca D'Auria 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.
A mark of 7.88 means one thing beside a twenty-nine-year-old's name and something else entirely beside a 18-year-old's. Nobody at the ground needed telling which this was.
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Oumar Camara Sinaba is 19, and the version of him training now would not have got into the side he was in a year ago.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Petko Hristov was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
He is 18 and the ground already sings his name, which is a thing that happens to local boys and almost never to signings. Everything from here is measured against an affection he did nothing to earn except be from here.