The words a physio says slowly. 28 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.
Player ratings3 Apr 2028
Tyron Kariuki, 21, plays like he has been here for years — 8.46
A mark of 8.46 means one thing beside a twenty-nine-year-old's name and something else entirely beside a 21-year-old's. Nobody at the ground needed telling which this was.
Nashon Alembi 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.
It has been denied twice and printed three times, which is the usual arithmetic. Until Patrick Otieno signs something — a contract at KCB or anywhere else — this column belongs to him.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at KCB this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Footballers are asked about their boyhood club so often that nobody listens to the answer. Chris Colvey has just signed for KCB, and for once the answer mattered.
“I am grateful for the games, but I did not become a footballer to be somebody else's spare part.” He wants to be at KCB, and 1 appearances in 5 say he has earned the hearing.
16 times he got in the way of something. Centre-halves get written about when they make mistakes and ignored when they do not, so an afternoon like this needs saying out loud: he is the reason the scoreline reads as it does.
Deklan Smith is 19, and KCB have signed him for the player he will be rather than the one he is. The first team can wait; the point of a deal like this is the years it buys.
27 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Canterbury United lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Clayton Lewis is 21, and the version of him training now would not have got into the side he was in a year ago.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Canterbury United this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
At 27 the improving is meant to be over. It is not: 3 points better than the mark taken at the start of the year, which is the sort of thing that happens to players who take the boring parts of the job seriously.
The phone has started ringing about Jai Bell again, and this time the name on the line is Hawke's Bay United. Canterbury United are listening politely and promising nothing.
“We keep meeting, and we keep leaving the room with the same numbers we walked in with.” Another round of talks at Canterbury United, another week without a signature from Owen Fenton.
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Canterbury United 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 Canterbury United can pretend not to have heard.
“Things were said to me before I signed. I am not going to repeat them, but I remember all of them.” Canterbury United have not answered, which is an answer of sorts.
96 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Canterbury United lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
“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 Canterbury United, and it is not being withdrawn.