135 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Sibenik 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 Sibenik this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Tomislav Petkovic is 15, and the version of him training now would not have got into the side he was in a year ago.
The words a physio says slowly. 52 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.
The hardest thing about being 21 in a senior side is that nobody makes allowances. Mateo Bačić did not need any: 8.06, and he looked the most comfortable man on the pitch.
Šime Gržan and a teammate said things this week that will take longer than a week to unsay. It was not about football, and both of them play on Saturday.
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.
Successful dribbles: 17. He went past people as if he had been told there was a prize for it, and by the end the full-back had stopped pretending to try.
The words a physio says slowly. 67 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.
Joe Lewis and a teammate went at it, and not about football. Training grounds are small places and a long season makes them smaller.
Squad14 Sep 2026
Words at Sibenik training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Šime Gržan 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.
Sibenik asked and Dinamo Minsk said no without discussing a figure. It is the least ambiguous answer in football and the one clubs most often come back to test.
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.
Clubs spend fortunes looking for players and occasionally find one down the corridor. Andrej Livaja is that, and the reception he gets on his first appearance will be different in kind from the one any signing receives.
The academy exists for exactly this morning. Tomislav Petkovic has come through every age group the club runs and has now been handed a senior number, and the people who coached him at twelve will be the proudest in the building.