Juan Savarino 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.
31 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Estudiantes de Caracas lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Estudiantes de Caracas this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Yackson Rivas 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.
At 21 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.
Marked 8.33. Players have careers without a single afternoon like this in them, and he has just had one in front of everybody at Estudiantes de Caracas.
A season-long audition: Aragua still own him, but the shirt and the minutes are Estudiantes de Caracas's to give. A loan is a bet both clubs believe they are winning.
There is an age at which every good afternoon gets described as a throwback, which is unfair and also accurate. 8.11 at 33, and nobody on the pitch was better.
Juan Savarino 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.
At 23 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.
The words a physio says slowly. 42 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.
Juan Savarino 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.
7 signings in three months. Every one of them may be an upgrade and the team can still be worse for a while, which is the part of a rebuild that never appears in the transfer-window verdicts.
He is 16, and nobody at Atletico Venezuela signed him for this season. Deals like this are judged in four years, by people who may not still be in the building.
Junior Herrera is 16, and Atletico Venezuela 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.