“This is not anger. I have thought about it for months, and nothing that has happened lately changed my mind.” The request is on a desk at US Moursal, and it is not being withdrawn.
“I watch every US Moursal game from here. That says everything about where my head is.” The loan at Galactik runs its course, but his heart never made the trip.
He is 27, he is from here, and the shirt he was raised to wear has gone to somebody bought for it. The academy staff have noticed, and so has the town.
Nothing is announced when this happens and everybody knows. He is a bigger part of the plan at US Moursal than he was a month ago, and the training ground worked that out before the team sheet said so.
He used to wear the other shirt. On Saturday he plays against AS Algoy in this one, and whatever he says this week about it being just another game will be untrue.
It has been denied twice and printed three times, which is the usual arithmetic. Until Saleh Hissein signs something — a contract at US Moursal or anywhere else — this column belongs to him.
Nobody at Galactik will say this on the record and the team sheets have been saying it for weeks. There is a small group in every squad who get picked when the fixture is difficult, and he has joined it.
He wheeled away like a man who had been carrying it for months, because he had. Galactik have their signing off the mark and one press-conference question retired.
“Things were said to me before I signed. I am not going to repeat them, but I remember all of them.” Galactik have not answered, which is an answer of sorts.
Two goals and a mark of 8.98 to go with them. Strikers are judged on afternoons like this one and remembered for far fewer of them than people imagine.
The hardest thing about being 21 in a senior side is that nobody makes allowances. Abdelaziz Youssouf did not need any: 7.74, and he looked the most comfortable man on the pitch.
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.
It finished 2‑0, and it was Ousmane Biani’s afternoon: on the scoresheet when it mattered, and the reason the points belong to Galactik.
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8 new faces, and Galactik are still learning each other
A squad rebuilt inside one window pays for it in a currency nobody budgets for. The football is not worse than the sum of the players; it is worse than the sum of the players who have played together before.
“The players deserve the credit. My job was easy today.” It was not, and everybody in the room knew it; after 2‑0, Mahamat Bechir could afford to be generous.
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The division's best last weekend was a Galactik man
It is a small honour and it is not nothing: somebody watched every match in the division and decided that Ousmane Biani was the best thing in any of them.
“It had gone on long enough. I would rather have it out than leave it sitting there.” Ten minutes behind a closed door at Galactik, and both men came out saying it was fine.
A year in and the city has not opened up, the language has not come, and lunch is eaten alone more often than anybody at Galactik would admit. It shows on Saturdays.
Some afternoons a goalkeeper is the whole of the defence. 8 saves, several of them the kind nobody expects to see made, and ten outfield players who owe him a drink.
“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.
36 months left and silence from upstairs — no offer, no talks, nothing for his people to answer. Clubs that let a calendar do their negotiating usually end up negotiating with the calendar.
The plan went upstairs and came back down. Nothing about that will make a headline anywhere else, and everybody who works at the training ground will remember it for years.
“It had gone on long enough. I would rather have it out than leave it sitting there.” Ten minutes behind a closed door at Galactik, and both men came out saying it was fine.
Everything agreed with Renaissance, everything agreed with the player; a doctor is the only person left to persuade. The photograph is a day or two away.
Galactik had done everything except persuade the man himself. He stays at AS PSI, and the manager goes back to the drawing board with the money still in the bank.
The academy exists for exactly this morning. Marius Djimet has come through every age group the club runs and has now been handed a senior number, and the people who coached him at twelve will be the proudest in the building.
Clubs spend fortunes looking for players and occasionally find one down the corridor. Brahim Abba is that, and the reception he gets on his first appearance will be different in kind from the one any signing receives.
Clubs spend fortunes looking for players and occasionally find one down the corridor. Issa Mahamat is that, and the reception he gets on his first appearance will be different in kind from the one any signing receives.
The academy exists for exactly this morning. Ahmat Bechir has come through every age group the club runs and has now been handed a senior number, and the people who coached him at twelve will be the proudest in the building.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Galactik this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what US Moursal can pretend not to have heard.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at US Moursal this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
The phone has started ringing about Idriss Youssouf again, and this time the name on the line is Galactik. US Moursal are listening politely and promising nothing.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Oumar Youssouf was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
US Moursal have made the call to Foullah Edifice. No fee, a share of the wages, and a spare shirt in the position where the squad has been thinnest all season.