Bourama Diallo had done his part in building a 3-goal cushion. What happened after that was collective, and AS Korofina were allowed back into a match that had been finished with.
Two goals and a mark of 8.29 to go with them. Strikers are judged on afternoons like this one and remembered for far fewer of them than people imagine.
Aboubacar Haïdara 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.
13 goals and a season average of 7.27 will do that. The space he used to find has gone; he keeps scoring anyway, which is the mark of the real thing.
Squad20 Jan 2031
Samuel Okon 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.
Two goals and a mark of 8.90 to go with them. Strikers are judged on afternoons like this one and remembered for far fewer of them than people imagine.
Player ratings13 Jan 2031
Mamadou Bagayoko, 19, plays like he has been here for years — 7.92
A mark of 7.92 means one thing beside a twenty-nine-year-old's name and something else entirely beside a 19-year-old's. Nobody at the ground needed telling which this was.
“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 The request is on a desk at AS Bakaridjan, and it is not being withdrawn.
Terms are settled between the clubs and the rest is paperwork and a photograph. Around AS Bakaridjan they have already started talking about him in the past tense.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at AS Bakaridjan this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad13 Jan 2031
Words at AS Bakaridjan training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Samuel Okon 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.
Add another name to the list: AS Police have asked the question everybody in the game has been asking about Amadou Malle. The answer from AS Bakaridjan has not changed — yet.
20 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. AS Bakaridjan lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason AS Bakaridjan will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
Some afternoons a goalkeeper is the team. 7 saves, several of them the sort nobody expects to see stopped, and a scoreline that flatters everybody in front of him.
The hardest thing about being 18 in a senior side is that nobody makes allowances. Ibrahim Soumare did not need any: 8.66, and he looked the most comfortable man on the pitch.
Fee agreed, terms agreed, medical booked. Lassana Sacko will be somebody else’s player by the weekend, and around AS Bakaridjan the goodbyes have quietly begun.