Marked for Patrick Daehli
From our football correspondent
Crisis
Squad15 Jul 2030
Vukašin Bogdanović 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.
Squad15 Jul 2030
At 26 the improving is meant to be over. It is not: 3 points better than the mark taken at the start of the year, which is the sort of thing that happens to players who take the boring parts of the job seriously.
Squad15 Jul 2030
Ange Chiesa 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.
Back issues
From our football correspondent
Crisis
Boardroom8 Jul 2030
Darko Rajkovic has until the next board meeting
What was said behind closed doors has now been said in front of a microphone. Everybody at Radnik Surdulica can do the arithmetic, including the man it is aimed at.
Squad8 Jul 2030
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Radnik Surdulica this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad8 Jul 2030
Sinisa Savic is a better footballer than he was
Not a run of form — an actual step up, held for months. At 16 he is doing things at this level he could not do at the start of the season, and the coaching staff will tell you exactly which of them.
Squad8 Jul 2030
Darko Stojanović 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.
Market8 Jul 2030
He is 20, and nobody at Radnik Surdulica signed him for this season. Deals like this are judged in four years, by people who may not still be in the building.
Boardroom8 Jul 2030
6 arrivals, an average age nobody would call a squad, and a set of parents being shown around a building their sons will spend more time in than at home. The scouting has already happened; today is only the paperwork.
Squad8 Jul 2030
“Some decisions take a long time. This one took ten minutes, and most of that was finding a pen.” Patrick Daehli and Radnik Surdulica agree another 3 years.
Boardroom8 Jul 2030
What was available in the summer has quietly gone. Upstairs nobody will call it a change of ambition; downstairs nobody will call it anything else.
Market8 Jul 2030
No place for Sinisa Savic in the plan
“The manager did not use many words, and he did not need to.” Sinisa Savic has his answer from Radnik Surdulica; what he does with it is the next window’s story.