The clubs have agreed terms, and what remains is formality: a medical, a photograph, a signature. Nobody at Mattersburg is pretending he will be back in the shirt.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Sebastian Trimmel was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
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.
12 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.
108 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Mattersburg lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Some afternoons a goalkeeper is the whole of the defence. 12 saves, several of them the kind nobody expects to see made, and ten outfield players who owe him a drink.
Position 10 and 5 points, and the table gets read bottom-up in this part of town. The calendar has stopped being a schedule and started being a countdown.
The clubs have agreed terms, and what remains is formality: a medical, a photograph, a signature. Nobody at Mattersburg is pretending he will be back in the shirt.
Defending was optional and nobody took up the option. 6 goals between Mattersburg and Wolfsberger AC, and not one of the people who paid to be there will ask for the money back.
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.