“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what RC Lens can pretend not to have heard.
Mattia Fortin 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.
Squad9 Feb 2043
Samson Baidoo 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.
The clubs have agreed terms, and what remains is formality: a medical, a photograph, a signature. Nobody at RC Lens is pretending he will be back in the shirt.
65 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. RC Lens lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Brutal, unambiguous and, for all the horror of the moment, usually less career-shaped than the ligament everybody fears more. 94 days, a clean timeline, and a return date somebody can actually plan around.
Fee agreed, terms agreed, medical booked. Anders Hoeg will be somebody else’s player by the weekend, and around RC Lens the goodbyes have quietly begun.
Mattia Fortin 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.
The words a physio says slowly. 75 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.
Brutal, unambiguous and, for all the horror of the moment, usually less career-shaped than the ligament everybody fears more. 101 days, a clean timeline, and a return date somebody can actually plan around.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at RC Lens this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad24 Feb 2042
Words at RC Lens training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Samson Baidoo 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 best deals are the ones the accountants never notice. Frédéric Vidal arrives at RC Lens with his wages the only cost and something to prove the only clause.