72 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Pianese lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Fee agreed, wages agreed, and Carrarese waiting with a shirt. Nobody at Pianese is pretending otherwise, and the supporters have stopped asking whether and started asking when.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Pianese can pretend not to have heard.
Leonardo Di Cosmo 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.
Pianese asked and Cagliari said no without discussing a figure. It is the least ambiguous answer in football and the one clubs most often come back to test.
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.
The academy exists for exactly this morning. Ignazio De Santis has come through every age group the club runs and has now been handed a senior number, and the people who coached him at twelve will be the proudest in the building.
Pianese had done everything except persuade the man himself. He stays at Arzignano, and the manager goes back to the drawing board with the money still in the bank.
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.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Pianese 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. 3 points of it, over months, at an age where the direction normally only goes one way.
Not now, not at any price the club was prepared to say out loud. Audace Cerignola have kept their man, and Pianese go back to a list with one name crossed off it.
19 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Pianese lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
“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 Pianese, and it is not being withdrawn.
Leonardo Di Cosmo 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. Periklis Perikleous is living that version at Pianese, and it tends to show in the first month.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Matteo Colombo was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
Signings arrive with a picture of the club in their head, and this one’s picture was bigger than the building. He will play well and he will be gone, in that order, and everybody knows it.
“Thirty minutes, door closed, everything said. We shook hands after.” Whatever was in the room stayed in the room, and Francesco Chesti trained the next morning like a man with less to carry.