Nobody makes a documentary about a hamstring and everybody in the game fears one. Lokomotiv Gomel will be careful with the return date, because the second one is always worse than the first.
Ivan Rios 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.
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.
In brief
SquadWords at Lokomotiv Gomel training over how hard people work
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Lokomotiv Gomel will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
Ivan Rios 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 figure at which a wage bill stops being ambitious and becomes the reason nothing else is possible, and this club has reached it. Nothing is left over for a transfer, a stand or a rainy afternoon.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Lokomotiv Gomel can pretend not to have heard.
“We keep meeting, and we keep leaving the room with the same numbers we walked in with.” Another round of talks at Lokomotiv Gomel, another week without a signature from Vitaliy Urbanovich.
“I watch every Lokomotiv Gomel game from here. That says everything about where my head is.” The loan at Neman runs its course, but his heart never made the trip.
Squad14 Sep 2026
Yan Arlouski 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.
“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 The request is on a desk at Lokomotiv Gomel, and it is not being withdrawn.
The award is a small thing with a heavy meaning: for four weeks nobody in this division did his job better. Lokomotiv Gomel have the trophy on a shelf and the player in the side.