Marked for Arthur do Vale
From our football correspondent
Crisis
Squad23 Aug 2027
The words a physio says slowly. 14 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.
Squad23 Aug 2027
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Jude Mamman is 21, and the version of him training now would not have got into the side he was in a year ago.
Transfer targets23 Aug 2027
Everything agreed with Santos, everything agreed with the player; a doctor is the only person left to persuade. The photograph is a day or two away.
Squad23 Aug 2027
“The easiest signature of my career.” Anis Mahdi Mendil and ES Mostaganem agree another 4 years, and the manager can plan around him rather than about him.
Squad23 Aug 2027
At 28 the improving is meant to be over, and it is not: 3 points better than a year ago. It happens to the ones who take the boring parts seriously.
The dugout23 Aug 2027
“I pick players who do the work. All of it.” No name was spoken; every camera still turned to Abdelhafid Benamara, and the manager let it.
Back issues
From our football correspondent
Crisis
The terraces16 Aug 2027
Anger at ES Mostaganem spills outside the ground
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.
Squad16 Aug 2027
22 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. ES Mostaganem lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
Boardroom16 Aug 2027
Nobody upstairs has said anything, which is the loudest thing they could do. Results buy silence in this game; the account at ES Mostaganem is running low.
Match16 Aug 2027
Position 16, 15 points, and a fixture list with fewer games left in it than excuses. The arithmetic is not cruel yet, but it has stopped being kind.
Squad16 Aug 2027
Not a run of form — an actual step up, held for months. At 22 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.
Squad16 Aug 2027
Taher Ben Khelifa has improved at 33, 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.
Squad16 Aug 2027
Words at ES Mostaganem training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Kammonke Willie 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.
Transfer targets16 Aug 2027
A loan enquiry to Santos: cover, or a look at somebody the club cannot afford to buy yet. Either way the answer will come back inside the week.
The dugout16 Aug 2027
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 Massinissa Nezla has written the date down.