Marked for Patrick Ryerson
From our football correspondent
Crisis
Squad24 May 2038
Brutal, unambiguous and, for all the horror of the moment, usually less career-shaped than the ligament everybody fears more. 31 days, a clean timeline, and a return date somebody can actually plan around.
Match22 May 2038
4 matches without a win for Mjondalen
The run now stands at 4, and the questions being asked around Mjondalen are no longer polite ones.
Squad24 May 2038
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Mjondalen this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Player ratings24 May 2038
Marked 8.91 — the sort of number a correspondent writes down twice to be sure. Everything he tried came off, and what he did not try was not worth trying.
Squad24 May 2038
“Nobody here is above being told.” It was not said with a name attached, but the dressing room can count, and so can everybody who was listening.
Back issues
From our football correspondent
Crisis
The terraces21 Sep 2037
The mood at Mjondalen 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.
Player ratings21 Sep 2037
Two goals and a mark of 9.03 to go with them. Strikers are judged on afternoons like this one and remembered for far fewer of them than people imagine.
Player ratings21 Sep 2037
At 33 he is supposed to be managing his minutes. Instead he was marked 8.50 and looked, for ninety minutes, exactly like the player everybody remembers.
Squad21 Sep 2037
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Mjondalen this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad21 Sep 2037
Lars Markmanrud 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.
Match19 Sep 2037
IK Start made Mjondalen work for it, but the scoreboard read 2‑0 at the end and the table does not ask how.
Squad21 Sep 2037
Defences have started doubling up on Lima
6 goals and a season average of 7.45 will do that. The space he used to find has gone; he keeps scoring anyway, which is the mark of the real thing.
Player ratings21 Sep 2037
Defensive actions: 19. He was first to everything and second to nothing, and the goalkeeper had an easy day because of it.
Squad21 Sep 2037
A player who expected to start watched it instead. The manager will call it a decision for the team; Keerat Singh Mann will call it something else in private.
From our football correspondent
Uneasy
Squad25 May 2037
A fracture rules Stian Ryerson out for 28 days
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Mjondalen will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
Squad25 May 2037
There were 6 saves in it, and at least three that had no business being saves at all. The ten outfield players owe him a drink and they know it.
Player ratings25 May 2037
Nickolay Årsbog, 33, rolls back the years — 8.18
There is an age at which every good afternoon gets described as a throwback, which is unfair and also accurate. 8.18 at 33, and nobody on the pitch was better.
Squad25 May 2037
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Mjondalen this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad25 May 2037
Words at Mjondalen training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Lars Markmanrud 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.
Player ratings25 May 2037
Ninety minutes of Lima at his very best
Marked 8.71. Players have careers without a single afternoon like this in them, and he has just had one in front of everybody at Mjondalen.
Match23 May 2037
No time for Valerenga to settle
The goal that put Valerenga ahead was still being replayed on the concourse when Mjondalen equalised, 3 minutes later. Leads are only worth what you do with them.
Match23 May 2037
It finished 2‑2, and it somehow always looked like it would. One of those afternoons where the table moves less than the tempers.
Player ratings25 May 2037
Successful dribbles: 15. Every time he got the ball somebody had to make a decision, and every time the decision was wrong.
From our football correspondent
Crisis
Squad5 Jan 2037
A knee injury of the worst kind for Keerat Singh Mann
85 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Mjondalen lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Boardroom5 Jan 2037
The board have said in public what they had been saying in private. Results between now and the next meeting decide it, and everybody in the building knows the arithmetic.
Boardroom5 Jan 2037
The official line will be that it was routine. It was not routine, the timing says so, and every person in that room knows what the next bad result costs.
Squad5 Jan 2037
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Mjondalen this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad5 Jan 2037
It is never announced and it is entirely visible: the biggest afternoons of the season keep containing him. A press box works this out long before anybody at the club confirms a word of it.
Squad5 Jan 2037
The manager's exit leaves Donat Mehmeti exposed
Every squad has men who were signed by a particular manager and men who were merely inherited. Donat Mehmeti is in the first group, and the man who wanted him here is no longer in the building.