108 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Astra lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
A bone, which is the one injury with a calendar attached. Astra will name a return date and, unusually for this business, will probably be right about it.
Some afternoons a goalkeeper is the team. 8 saves, several of them the sort nobody expects to see stopped, and a scoreline that flatters everybody in front of him.
The last thing about a transfer that is still about the player is his signature on his own terms, and it is there. Astra have lost him in all but the paperwork.
Add another name to the list: Torpedo-BelAZ have asked the question everybody in the game has been asking about Ionuţ Cercel. The answer from Astra has not changed — yet.
The clubs had agreed and the player had not. A snub, and a public one: Paris Saint-Germain keep him, and the supporters here are left wondering what he had heard about the place.
Marius Keseru 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.
Position 10 and 8 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.
Brutal, unambiguous and, for all the horror of the moment, usually less career-shaped than the ligament everybody fears more. 78 days, a clean timeline, and a return date somebody can actually plan around.
The clubs have agreed terms, and what remains is formality: a medical, a photograph, a signature. Nobody at Astra is pretending he will be back in the shirt.
The offer went to Viitorul 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.
Marius Keseru 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.
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Mohamed Sesay is 23, and the version of him training now would not have got into the side he was in a year ago.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Andrei Dragusin is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.
It has stopped being a mood in the stands and started being something organised. Boards can ignore a bad atmosphere for a long time; they cannot ignore this stage of it for very long at all.
The board’s statement ran to three sentences and one of them mentioned results. Ionut Chiriches has managed long enough to translate: win soon, or the next statement is shorter.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Astra can pretend not to have heard.
The deadline has passed and the squad is the squad. 1 arrived, 1 left, and everything else printed about this club last month was a rumour that stayed one.
Marius Keseru 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.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Sergiu Iancu is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.
Brutal, unambiguous and, for all the horror of the moment, usually less career-shaped than the ligament everybody fears more. 76 days, a clean timeline, and a return date somebody can actually plan around.
At 22 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.
George Keseru 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.
At 28 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.
Olympique Lyonnais have been asked whether they would lend him. Loans are agreed quickly or not at all, and this one will be one or the other by the weekend.
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Astra will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Astra this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Sergiu Iancu was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.