“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 The request is on a desk at Monte Azul, and it is not being withdrawn.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Monte Azul this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad6 Sep 2032
Words at Monte Azul training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Vitor Oliveira 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.
“I have tried. I have really tried, and every day I wake up in the wrong place.” Nobody at Monte Azul can coach that out of a man, and nobody there is pretending to.
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 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.
Clubs make promises constantly and the page usually only hears about them when they are broken. This one was honoured, and the dressing room noticed that faster than any supporter did.
A bad atmosphere can be waited out. A group of people meeting afterwards to decide what to do about it cannot, and everybody in the building knows which stage this is.
The most common injury in the game and the most rushed back from. Monte Azul will quote 16 days and will be careful with it, because the second one is always worse than the first.
4 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.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Vitor Oliveira was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
“We were not good enough today and I am not going to dress it up.” Interim Coach after 1‑2, in the tone of a man who knows the next question and does not intend to answer it.
Gui Sales 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.
24 days, the medical staff say, and medical staff are optimists by profession. The team sheet will look wrong without him.
Squad23 Feb 2032
Words at Monte Azul training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Alex Li 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 borrowing is past what the bank agreed, which is the line where a debt stops being how football is financed and starts being a problem. Every phone-in in this town will quote the figure for the next five years.
Nobody will confirm it and the team sheets confirm it every week. One error has bought him a spell as second choice that is already longer than the error deserved.
Another week, another link, another denial nobody quite believes. Monte Azul know the market decides these things, not the back pages — but the back pages are louder.
5 months left, and both sides know what that means: every week without a signature, the fee Monte Azul could ask drops and the wages Yuri Melo can ask rise.