105 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. Cortulua lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
It is the most legitimate ambition in the sport and the hardest for most clubs to satisfy. Felipe Gonzalez wants continental football; whether Cortulua can provide it is a question about the next two seasons, not about him.
Jefferson Mejia 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.
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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.
“Thirty minutes, door closed, everything said. We shook hands after.” Whatever was in the room stayed in the room, and Ramón Córdoba trained the next morning like a man with less to carry.
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.
Nothing in writing and nothing in public: a word about playing time, given face to face at Cortulua. The team sheets over the next month will show whether it was worth having.
A manager forgives a bad Saturday far more readily than a bad Tuesday, because one of them he can explain and the other one he chose. The reports this week have not been good.
The words a physio says slowly. 113 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.
Brutal, unambiguous and, for all the horror of the moment, usually less career-shaped than the ligament everybody fears more. 21 days, a clean timeline, and a return date somebody can actually plan around.
“Things were said to me before I signed. I am not going to repeat them, but I remember all of them.” Cortulua have not answered, which is an answer of sorts.
Jefferson Mejia 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.
There is a version of every career where the player ends up somewhere he chose rather than somewhere that chose him. Jorge Akamine is living that version at Cortulua, and it tends to show in the first month.
Every manager keeps a short list in his head of the men he wants on the pitch when the stakes rise, and it is never published. The team sheets for the big afternoons say Francisco Castillo is on it.
Nobody sells a season ticket on a signing like this. Every manager who has been through a bad October wants one anyway, and Cortulua have gone and got theirs early.
A bone, which is the one injury with a calendar attached. Cortulua will name a return date and, unusually for this business, will probably be right about it.
The clubs have settled the fee and he has settled his wages. What remains is a medical and a photograph, and around Cortulua people have started saying his name in the past tense.
The words a physio says slowly. 49 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 33 he is supposed to be managing his minutes. Instead he was marked 8.31 and looked, for ninety minutes, exactly like the player everybody remembers.
In brief
Player ratingsNinety minutes of Jefferson Lemos at his very best
Jefferson Mejia 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 general version of this complaint is that a player wants more. The specific version names the thing: he wants to walk out under floodlights against clubs from other countries, and he has stopped pretending otherwise.
Marked 8.09 — the sort of number a correspondent writes down twice to be sure. Everything he tried came off, and what he did not try was not worth trying.
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Sergio Falcao was on a different afternoon to everybody else
8.01. There are performances a supporter describes to somebody who was not there and cannot quite convey; this was one, and the number does not help either.
The system has changed and his position has not. A footballer can improve his form; he cannot improve the manager’s formation, and that is the whole of the problem.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Julian Cuadrado was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.