Ibrahim Salah 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 goals in 31 games at Karlsruher SC — numbers that travel home faster than he does. Somebody at Basel updates a spreadsheet every Monday, and it makes better reading each week.
Nobody at Basel 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.
Nothing in writing and nothing in public: a word about playing time, given face to face at Basel. The team sheets over the next month will show whether it was worth having.
“Thirty minutes, door closed, everything said. We shook hands after.” Whatever was in the room stayed in the room, and Moussa Cissé trained the next morning like a man with less to carry.
The word out of the training ground is that he has been the sharpest man there all week. It is the quietest story a paper carries and it usually runs the week before somebody's run in the side begins.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Ibrahim Salah was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
“I watch every Basel game from here. That says everything about where my head is.” The loan at Operário Ferroviário runs its course, but his heart never made the trip.
Nobody at Basel 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.
It has been denied twice and printed three times, which is the usual arithmetic. Until Philip Otele signs something — a contract at Basel or anywhere else — this column belongs to him.
“Some mornings you wake up and you are still a long way from everything you know.” It is not the football and it never was; Basel are dealing with a man who wants a different country.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Basel this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Žan Celar 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.
Nobody at Basel 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.
Another week, another link, another denial nobody quite believes. Basel know the market decides these things, not the back pages — but the back pages are louder.
A year in and the language has not come, the city has not opened up, and he eats alone more often than anybody at Basel would like to admit. It is showing on Saturdays.
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.
Something was said to Kevin Rüegg and then it happened. In this industry that passes for remarkable, and the dressing room noticed faster than any supporter could.
The team sheet says it in public every week until it changes. The only version of being dropped a footballer cannot argue with, and the one he takes hardest.