It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Atletico Venezuela this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
The hardest thing about being 21 in a senior side is that nobody makes allowances. Richard Arango did not need any: 8.02, and he looked the most comfortable man on the pitch.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Atletico Venezuela this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
At 22 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 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.
It is not much of a headline and it is the reason players believe the next promise. Atletico Venezuela told Richard Arango something would happen and then it happened, which in this industry passes for remarkable.
Some goals win a match and some take one off somebody else. Franco Varela scored in the 87th minute, Aragua had already begun thinking about the journey home, and Atletico Venezuela took the lot.
At 33 he is supposed to be managing his minutes. Instead he was marked 7.98 and looked, for ninety minutes, exactly like the player everybody remembers.
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.
Ask anyone on the way out what separated the sides and you will get one name: Franco Varela. 2‑1 against Aragua, and the applause at the whistle was mostly his.
4 without a win now, and the ground has developed the special quiet of a crowd that expects the worst. One scrappy 1-0 would cure most of it; that is the maddening part.
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.