The words a physio says slowly. 16 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.
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.
24 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.
“Things were said to me before I signed. I am not going to repeat them, but I remember all of them.” Andorra have not answered, which is an answer of sorts.
Aleix Febas 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.
Squad4 Sep 2028
Marc Domènech 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.
Marked 8.36 — 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.
33 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.
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Aingeru Olabarrieta is 22, and the version of him training now would not have got into the side he was in a year ago.
5 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.
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.
Squad28 Aug 2028
Words at Andorra training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Marc Domènech 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.
Marked 8.27 — 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.
The words a physio says slowly. 41 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.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Andorra can pretend not to have heard.
The phone has started ringing about Aihen Muñoz again, and this time the name on the line is Ludogorets. Andorra are listening politely and promising nothing.
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.
Squad21 Aug 2028
Marc Domènech has improved at 25, which nobody expected
Careers are supposed to plateau and then decline, and the players who ignore that are always the ones who were listening on the training ground. 5 points of it, over months, at an age where the direction normally only goes one way.
5 boys move up, and somewhere in the building the people who coached them at twelve are quietly having the best morning of their working year. Nothing about this shows up in a result and it is why the academy exists.
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.