The words a physio says slowly. 82 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 board have said in public what they had been saying in private. Results between now and the next meeting decide it, and everybody in the building knows the arithmetic.
“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 The request is on a desk at Sibir, and it is not being withdrawn.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Alexandr Nosov was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
Every squad has men who were signed by a particular manager and men who were merely inherited. Petr Kosarevskiy is in the first group, and the man who wanted him here is no longer in the building.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Alexandr Nosov 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.
Every club 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 it has been tried.
6 signings in three months. Every one of them may be an upgrade and the team can still be worse for a while, which is the part of a rebuild that never appears in the transfer-window verdicts.
“It had gone on long enough. I would rather have it out than leave it sitting there.” Ten minutes behind a closed door at Sibir, and both men came out saying it was fine.
Nobody at Sibir 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.
32 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Sibir lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Fee agreed, terms agreed, medical booked. Dmitry Redkovich will be somebody else’s player by the weekend, and around Sibir the goodbyes have quietly begun.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Sibir this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Petr Kosarevskiy 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.
The academy exists for exactly this morning. Vitaliy Plotnikov 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. Bogdan Kharlamov 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. Danila Leskov 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.