Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Gandzasar will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
Position 8 and 15 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.
The words a physio says slowly. 85 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.
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Gandzasar will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
Bertrand Mani 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.
Squad7 Feb 2028
Words at Gandzasar training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Jerzino 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.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Gandzasar can pretend not to have heard.
Bertrand Mani 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. Igors Vanins is living that version at Gandzasar, and it tends to show in the first month.
In brief
SquadWords at Gandzasar training over how hard people work
Jan Paluska 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.
Squad6 Dec 2027
Words at Spartaks training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Edgar Mendoza 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 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.
Jan Paluska 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.
Squad29 Nov 2027
7 new faces, and Spartaks are still learning each other
A squad rebuilt inside one window pays for it in a currency nobody budgets for. The football is not worse than the sum of the players; it is worse than the sum of the players who have played together before.
The loan was meant to give him football. 12 games and 0 goals later he is back at Spartaks no further forward, and everybody involved will explain why it was not their doing.