16 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. Hebar lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
There is a particular kind of quiet from an away end watching one man score twice. Chico Teixeira provided it, and the 8.47 beside his name is if anything generous to everybody else.
The hardest thing about being 20 in a senior side is that nobody makes allowances. Samuel Pikolon did not need any: 8.14, and he looked the most comfortable man on the pitch.
At 38, 3 points below where he was, and a body that has started charging interest. It happens to all of them and it is still the hardest paragraph on this page.
11 combined actions and 6.86. The job he did is the one that shows up as other people looking good, and the only reliable way to notice it is to watch what happens on the afternoons he is missing.
23 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Hebar lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Two goals and a mark of 8.89 to go with them. Strikers are judged on afternoons like this one and remembered for far fewer of them than people imagine.
There is an age at which every good afternoon gets described as a throwback, which is unfair and also accurate. 8.62 at 34, and nobody on the pitch was better.
Not a run of form — an actual step up, held for months. At 20 he is doing things at this level he could not do at the start of the season, and the coaching staff will tell you exactly which of them.
André Santos 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.
Defending was optional and nobody took up the option. 7 goals between Hebar and Ludogorets II, and not one of the people who paid to be there will ask for the money back.
32 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Hebar lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Petar Marinov 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.
“We were not good enough today and I am not going to dress it up.” Petar Manolev after 0‑1, in the tone of a man who knows the next question and does not intend to answer it.
Every manager keeps a short list in his head of the men he wants on the pitch when the stakes rise, and it is never published. The team sheets for the big afternoons say Petar Marinov is on it.
“We keep meeting, and we keep leaving the room with the same numbers we walked in with.” Another round of talks at Hebar, another week without a signature from Hugo Faria.
The words a physio says slowly. 40 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.
Petar Marinov 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.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Viktor Vasilev was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
Behind, and beaten by any honest reading, until minute 87. Chernomorets Burgas had the points in their pocket and a corner of the ground still believed, which is generally when it happens.
Every club in football pays most of what it earns to its players. Paying nearly all of it is a different arrangement, and it has ended the same way every time somebody has tried it.
It needed Caio Assis to find the net to bring anything home at all: 1‑1 against Chernomorets Burgas, and half the dressing room will call it a point won.
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.
In brief
The dugoutThe manager’s verdict
The dugoutEmil Martinov knocks on the manager's door
Every footballer has an answer to the question about his boyhood club, and most of them never get to act on it. Petar Marinov has, at Hebar, and the first month will show what that does to a man.
The clubs had agreed and the player had not. A snub, and a public one: Slavia Sofia keep him, and the supporters here are left wondering what he had heard about the place.
The academy exists for exactly this morning. Nikolay Dyakov 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.
The academy exists for exactly this morning. Mihail Manolev 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.
The academy exists for exactly this morning. Kaloyan Manolev 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.