95 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Lida lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Lida will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Lida will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
The words a physio says slowly. 65 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.
Alexandr Poznyak 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 figure at which a wage bill stops being ambitious and becomes the reason nothing else is possible, and this club has reached it. Nothing is left over for a transfer, a stand or a rainy afternoon.
Djibrine Souleymane is 36 and has run out of things to prove. What he has left is where to stand, when to slow it down and what to say at half-time, and none of that is on a fitness chart.
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Kənan Feyziyev is 20, 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 AZAL this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
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. 4 points of it, over months, at an age where the direction normally only goes one way.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Afran Amirguliyev 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 been denied twice and printed three times, which is the usual arithmetic. Until Tamkin Sheydaev signs something — a contract at AZAL or anywhere else — this column belongs to him.
“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 The request is on a desk at AZAL, and it is not being withdrawn.
Not a run of form — an actual step up, held for months. At 22 he is doing things at this level he could not do at the start of the season, and the coaching staff will tell you exactly which of them.
The fee is $140.0K, the contract is signed, and the argument about whether he is worth it can begin. Kapaz drove a hard bargain; time will say who won it.
Qara Nadirov 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.
“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 AZAL, and it is not being withdrawn.
The instruction has come from upstairs rather than from the dugout, which is the version of this conversation no manager enjoys. Somebody in that squad is now available whether the man who picks the team thinks so or not.
Qara Nadirov 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.
Boards get told what they have done wrong for years and hear nothing on the days they get it right. This is one of those days: Kənan Feyziyev from Sumgayit for $110.0K, and a ticket office having a very good morning.
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.
“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 AZAL, and it is not being withdrawn.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at AZAL this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
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 Kamran Medvedev trained the next morning like a man with less to carry.