It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Inter this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
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.
Public backing, and the sort that costs a manager something if it turns out to be wrong. Namig Huseynov has been told in front of everybody that the shirt is his.
Namig Huseynov 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.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Inter this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
It is not much of a headline and it is the reason players believe the next promise. Inter told Renat Ramazanov something would happen and then it happened, which in this industry passes for remarkable.
The words a physio says slowly. 27 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.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Inter this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
1‑2 to Kapaz, and no complaints worth printing. The performance asked for nothing more than it got.
Player ratings23 Nov 2026
Renat Nazarov was on a different afternoon to everybody else
8.17. 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.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Vugar Khalilzade 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.
7.77, 1 on the scoresheet, and the specific comedy of a back-four player celebrating like somebody who does this every week. He does not, and that is exactly why the ground reacted the way it did.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Inter this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Four or five weekends of consistency, judged against everybody in the division doing his job. Araz Ramazanov has come out of that comparison in the side, and Inter have had the benefit of every one of those afternoons.
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 Orkhan Medvedev signs something — a contract at Inter or anywhere else — this column belongs to him.