45 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. Gazelle lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
A bone, which is the one injury with a calendar attached. Gazelle will name a return date and, unusually for this business, will probably be right about it.
4 without a win now, and the ground has developed the special quiet of a crowd that expects the worst. One scrappy 1-0 would cure most of it; that is the maddening part.
0‑1 to AS Algoy, and no complaints worth printing. The performance asked for nothing more than it got.
The dugout23 Nov 2026
The manager’s verdict
“That is on me. I pick the team and I picked wrong.” Managers say that when they mean it and when they need to be seen to, and after 0‑1 Abdramane Abba left the room before anybody could ask which.
5 new signings in one window. Every one may be an upgrade and the side can still be worse for a while, which is the part of a rebuild the verdicts never mention.
“Thirty minutes, door closed, everything said. We shook hands after.” Whatever was in the room stayed in the room, and Younes Rachid trained the next morning like a man with less to carry.
74 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Gazelle lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
A bone, which is the one injury with a calendar attached. Gazelle will name a return date and, unusually for this business, will probably be right about it.
Successful dribbles: 22. 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.
Yacine Wakili 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.
1‑2 to AS PSI, and no complaints worth printing. The performance asked for nothing more than it got.
Squad26 Oct 2026
8 new faces, and Gazelle 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 dugout26 Oct 2026
The view from the dugout
“We will look at it, we will learn from it, and we go again.” The three sentences every manager keeps for a 1‑2 defeat, delivered by Abdramane Abba to a room that had heard them before.
A bone, which is the one injury with a calendar attached. Stars Jeunes Talents will name a return date and, unusually for this business, will probably be right about it.
The words a physio says slowly. 56 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.
Abdramane Ngaradoumbe and a teammate said things this week that will take longer than a week to unsay. It was not about football, and both of them play on Saturday.
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.
Senior shirt numbers handed to boys the coaches have known since they were twelve. Most will not make it and all of them have already done the hard part.
The academy exists for exactly this morning. Ezechiel Oumar 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. Hassan Souleymane is that, and the reception he gets on his first appearance will be different in kind from the one any signing receives.
There is no fee, no unveiling and no agent on the steps. Saleh Haroun has been at this club since he was a boy and is now, formally, one of the first-team squad — which for a local readership beats any signing of any size.
The words a physio says slowly. 103 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.
At 18 he is doing things this season that he could not do last season, and doing them every week. Form comes and goes; this has stayed long enough to be called something else.
The most common injury in the game and the most rushed back from. Gazelle will quote 14 days and will be careful with it, because the second one is always worse than the first.
The offer went to Stars Jeunes Talents this week and it is theirs to answer. First bids are rarely meant to succeed; they are meant to find out how loud the door closes.
Gazelle asked and Stars Jeunes Talents said no without discussing a figure. It is the least ambiguous answer in football and the one clubs most often come back to test.
A season-long look at somebody else’s player: a squad player arrives from AS Etat Major with something to prove and a return ticket in the drawer. Good loans make everybody richer; this one starts Saturday.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Gazelle this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.