The clubs have agreed terms, and what remains is formality: a medical, a photograph, a signature. Nobody at Lida is pretending he will be back in the shirt.
Marco Medel 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.
The clubs have agreed terms, and what remains is formality: a medical, a photograph, a signature. Nobody at Lida is pretending he will be back in the shirt.
Alexey Legchilin 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. Samir Abdullayev is living that version at Lida, and it tends to show in the first month.
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.
Every club in football pays most of what it earns to its players. Paying nearly all of it is a different arrangement, and it has ended the same way every time somebody has tried it.
115 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Ravan lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Ravan can pretend not to have heard.
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.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Ravan this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Emil Səfərov 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.