A 4‑1 win over Racing Santander, a place in the next round, and the quiet arithmetic every supporter does on the walk home: how many more until a final?
2 goals, and the second was the one that settled it. Marked 9.39, and he could have had a third with better luck at the near post.
Player ratings9 Nov 2037
Luka Lorenzo, 20, plays like he has been here for years — 8.42
A mark of 8.42 means one thing beside a twenty-nine-year-old's name and something else entirely beside a 20-year-old's. Nobody at the ground needed telling which this was.
At 35 he is supposed to be managing his minutes. Instead he was marked 7.97 and looked, for ninety minutes, exactly like the player everybody remembers.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Girona this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
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.
Terms are settled between the clubs and the rest is paperwork and a photograph. Around Girona they have already started talking about him in the past tense.
“I want to win things, and I would like to do it here.” Nothing has been demanded and nothing has been threatened — but a boardroom at Girona hears a sentence like that exactly as it was built.
The words a physio says slowly. 102 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.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Girona can pretend not to have heard.
Arnau Martínez 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.
Terms are settled between the clubs and the rest is paperwork and a photograph. Around Girona they have already started talking about him in the past tense.
In brief
SquadWords at Girona training over how hard people work
Fee agreed, terms agreed, medical booked. Gonzalo Lozano will be somebody else’s player by the weekend, and around Girona the goodbyes have quietly begun.
A season average of 7.29 at an age when most of his year group are still in the youth team. Girona know what they have, and so, by now, does everybody else.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Girona this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
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.
13 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.