The mood at Andorra has turned into something else
Supporters who sing when it goes badly are supporters. Supporters who gather afterwards are a problem, and everybody inside the building knows which of the two this now is.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Andorra this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
The clubs have agreed terms, and what remains is formality: a medical, a photograph, a signature. Nobody at Andorra is pretending he will be back in the shirt.
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Jakob Ekdal is 22, and the version of him training now would not have got into the side he was in a year ago.
Squad6 Aug 2040
Words at Andorra training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Melle Meerdink 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.
Another week, another link, another denial nobody quite believes. Andorra know the market decides these things, not the back pages — but the back pages are louder.
15 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.
The words a physio says slowly. 32 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.
Brutal, unambiguous and, for all the horror of the moment, usually less career-shaped than the ligament everybody fears more. 17 days, a clean timeline, and a return date somebody can actually plan around.
At 33 he is supposed to be managing his minutes. Instead he was marked 7.89 and looked, for ninety minutes, exactly like the player everybody remembers.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Andorra this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
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.
“The manager did not use many words, and he did not need to.” Jesús Molina has his answer from Andorra; what he does with it is the next window’s story.
66 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Andorra lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Andorra will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
Aingeru Olabarrieta 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.
Terms are settled between the clubs and the rest is paperwork and a photograph. Around Andorra they have already started talking about him in the past tense.