27 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Gandzasar lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
He is not being dropped. There is simply nowhere in the formation Gandzasar are playing to put a man who does what he does, which is a harder thing to be told than any team sheet.
He is doing his job and he is not settling. Gandzasar were supposed to be a step up in his own reckoning, and his own reckoning has been adjusted since he arrived.
Fabio Sainsbury is 19, and Gandzasar have signed him for the player he will be rather than the one he is. The first team can wait; the point of a deal like this is the years it buys.
He is 20, and nobody at Gandzasar signed him for this season. Deals like this are judged in four years, by people who may not still be in the building.
Two goals and a mark of 9.20 to go with them. Strikers are judged on afternoons like this one and remembered for far fewer of them than people imagine.
The 89th minute, half the ground already edging towards the exits, and Ruslan Abdullayev decided nobody was going anywhere. Khazar had no time left to answer.
Paulo Roberto and a teammate said things this week that will take longer than a week to unsay. It was not about football, and both of them play on Saturday.
At 19 he is being sung about by people twice his age, which is an affection a signing has to earn over years and a local kid gets for turning up. It is also the hardest thing in football to live up to.
“If you cannot run for the shirt, somebody else will wear it.” No name was used and none was needed; every player in that room knew who it was for.
The dugout23 Nov 2026
The manager’s verdict
“I am not going to get carried away and I will not let them either. It was a good day. There will be harder ones.” Maksim Guseynov kept it short after the 3‑2 win, which is what managers do when they are happy.