68 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Auckland City lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
The clubs have agreed terms, and what remains is formality: a medical, a photograph, a signature. Nobody at Auckland City is pretending he will be back in the shirt.
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Ehsan Jahanbakhsh is 19, and the version of him training now would not have got into the side he was in a year ago.
The words a physio says slowly. 113 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.
Position 5 and 12 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.
“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 The request is on a desk at Auckland City, and it is not being withdrawn.
Joshua Risdon 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.
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.
Squad3 Jul 2028
David Yoo falls out with a teammate over standards
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.
There is a version of every career where the player ends up somewhere he chose rather than somewhere that chose him. Vouria Mohammadi is living that version at Auckland City, and it tends to show in the first month.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Auckland City this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad1 May 2028
Adam Mitchell falls out with a teammate over standards
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.
He is 19, and nobody at Auckland City signed him for this season. Deals like this are judged in four years, by people who may not still be in the building.
He is 18, and nobody at Auckland City signed him for this season. Deals like this are judged in four years, by people who may not still be in the building.