Marked for Dmitri Chaykovsky
From our football correspondent
Crisis
Squad2 Jul 2029
A knee injury of the worst kind for Roman Yermolin
22 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Textilschik lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Boardroom2 Jul 2029
The board’s statement ran to three sentences and one of them mentioned results. Daniil Fadeev has managed long enough to translate: win soon, or the next statement is shorter.
Boardroom2 Jul 2029
The Textilschik board call everybody in
Nothing has been announced and everybody understands what it means. A board that summons the whole football department on a Tuesday morning is a board that has stopped believing the problem will fix itself.
Squad2 Jul 2029
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Textilschik will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
The dugout2 Jul 2029
This is not rotation. Alexandr Ryabinkin has not been in the manager's plans for some time, and nobody at Textilschik is pretending otherwise.
Squad2 Jul 2029
Alexandr Morozov 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.
Boardroom2 Jul 2029
The owner puts $263.2K into Textilschik
This is money that keeps the lights on rather than money that buys a centre-half, and the difference is the whole story. A club funded by its owner rather than by its football has exactly one conversation left ahead of it.
Squad2 Jul 2029
Alexandr Ryabinkin 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.
Boardroom2 Jul 2029
The embargo bars a fee being paid for a player, whatever the manager thinks the squad needs. Every rumour printed about this club between now and its lifting is a rumour about a deal that cannot happen.
Back issues
From our football correspondent
Crisis
Squad25 Jun 2029
A knee injury of the worst kind for Roman Yermolin
30 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Textilschik lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Squad25 Jun 2029
A bone, which is the one injury with a calendar attached. Textilschik will name a return date and, unusually for this business, will probably be right about it.
The dugout25 Jun 2029
This is not rotation. Maxim Polyakov has not been in the manager's plans for some time, and nobody at Textilschik is pretending otherwise.
Squad25 Jun 2029
Andrey Yevdokimov and a teammate went at it, and not about football. Training grounds are small places and a long season makes them smaller.
Squad25 Jun 2029
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Ilja Klementjev was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
The dugout25 Jun 2029
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.
The dugout25 Jun 2029
“Thirty minutes, door closed, everything said. We shook hands after.” Whatever was in the room stayed in the room, and Ilja Klementjev trained the next morning like a man with less to carry.
Market25 Jun 2029
Textilschik have made Roman Yermolin available for transfer. A career at this club is over in all but paperwork.
From our football correspondent
Crisis
Match21 Aug 2027
9 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.
Match23 Aug 2027
Textilschik are in real trouble now
Position 10, 1 points, and a fixture list with fewer games left in it than excuses. The arithmetic is not cruel yet, but it has stopped being kind.
Match18 Aug 2027
The small margins put Textilschik out
Out, 1‑3 to Orel, and the long argument about which of the small moments decided it. The league is all there is now, and everybody knows it.
Market23 Aug 2027
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Textilschik can pretend not to have heard.
Match21 Aug 2027
0‑1 to Dinamo Moscow 2, and no complaints worth printing. The performance asked for nothing more than it got.
The dugout23 Aug 2027
“If you cannot run for the shirt, somebody else will wear it.” No name was used and none was needed; every player in that room knew who it was for.
Squad23 Aug 2027
Seymur Məmmədov 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.
Squad23 Aug 2027
Appearance number 100 for Dmitry Usov
100 games in this shirt, through managers and relegations and everything else. Service like it is disappearing from the game and the crowd knows what it is watching.
Squad23 Aug 2027
Maxim Boichenko and a teammate went at it, and not about football. Training grounds are small places and a long season makes them smaller.