It has stopped being a mood in the stands and started being something organised. Boards can ignore a bad atmosphere for a long time; they cannot ignore this stage of it for very long at all.
Máté Tuboly 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.
Squad14 Jun 2038
Nahuel Génez 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.
Squad14 Jun 2038
6 new faces, and Nea Salamis are still learning each other
A squad rebuilt inside one window pays for it in a currency nobody budgets for. The football is not worse than the sum of the players; it is worse than the sum of the players who have played together before.
Nobody at Nea Salamis will say this on the record and the team sheets have been saying it for weeks. There is a small group in every squad who get picked when the fixture is difficult, and he has joined it.
Daniel Pérez damages knee ligaments — 118 days out
The words a physio says slowly. 118 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.
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Nea Salamis will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
Máté Tuboly 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.
None of them will be seen by anybody outside the training ground for three years, most of them will never play a senior match, and one of them might change the club. That is the whole proposition, and it is why academies exist.
Daniel Pérez damages knee ligaments — 132 days out
The words a physio says slowly. 132 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.
Nobody upstairs has said anything, which is the loudest thing they could do. Results buy silence in this game; the account at Nea Salamis is running low.
Brutal, unambiguous and, for all the horror of the moment, usually less career-shaped than the ligament everybody fears more. 28 days, a clean timeline, and a return date somebody can actually plan around.
“This is not anger. I have thought about it for months, and nothing that has happened lately changed my mind.” The request is on a desk at Nea Salamis, and it is not being withdrawn.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Nea Salamis this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad1 Jun 2037
Words at Nea Salamis training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Daniel Pérez 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.
“We keep meeting, and we keep leaving the room with the same numbers we walked in with.” Another round of talks at Nea Salamis, another week without a signature from Freddy Noguera.
Squad1 Jun 2037
5 new faces, and Nea Salamis are still learning each other
A squad rebuilt inside one window pays for it in a currency nobody budgets for. The football is not worse than the sum of the players; it is worse than the sum of the players who have played together before.
34 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Nea Salamis lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Some afternoons a goalkeeper is the team. 9 saves, several of them the sort nobody expects to see stopped, and a scoreline that flatters everybody in front of him.
A 0‑3 beating by Anorthosis was the sort of result that empties a stadium long before the final whistle.
Player ratings15 Dec 2036
A brace, and Yorro Savage takes the afternoon — 8.55
There is a particular kind of quiet from an away end watching one man score twice. Yorro Savage provided it, and the 8.55 beside his name is if anything generous to everybody else.
Two or more conceded in each of the last 6 matches. It is not one mistake repeating itself, which would be the easier thing to fix; it is a different one every week.
Fee agreed, terms agreed, medical booked. Peter Shaw will be somebody else’s player by the weekend, and around Nea Salamis the goodbyes have quietly begun.
Máté Tuboly 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.
In brief
SquadDaniel Pérez falls out with a teammate over standards
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.
Terms are settled between the clubs and the rest is paperwork and a photograph. Around Nea Salamis they have already started talking about him in the past tense.
Squad17 Nov 2036
Daniel Pérez 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.
12 attempts, none of them in. He got into the right places all afternoon, which is the hard part, and did the easy part badly — and that is the version of a bad day a manager can live with.
Every touch is being weighed now, in print and everywhere else. Some players grow into that and some are quietly ruined by it, and nobody knows which in advance.
Two goals and a mark of 8.95 to go with them. Strikers are judged on afternoons like this one and remembered for far fewer of them than people imagine.
Brutal, unambiguous and, for all the horror of the moment, usually less career-shaped than the ligament everybody fears more. 45 days, a clean timeline, and a return date somebody can actually plan around.
There is an age at which every good afternoon gets described as a throwback, which is unfair and also accurate. 7.86 at 33, and nobody on the pitch was better.
Terms are settled between the clubs and the rest is paperwork and a photograph. Around Nea Salamis they have already started talking about him in the past tense.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Nea Salamis this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad20 Oct 2036
Words at Nea Salamis training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Cristóbal Vargas 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.
13 shots, and a count that reads like a good afternoon until you check the other column. Strikers survive weeks like this on the understanding that the chances keep arriving; the day they stop is the day it becomes a problem.