29 without a win is the sort of run that changes how a town talks about its club, and San Martín were the afternoon it stopped. Nothing is fixed by one result and everything feels different by one.
117 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Mitre lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
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.
Two goals and a mark of 9.38 to go with them. Strikers are judged on afternoons like this one and remembered for far fewer of them than people imagine.
Fee agreed, terms agreed, medical booked. Maximiliano Romero will be somebody else’s player by the weekend, and around Mitre the goodbyes have quietly begun.
He will play here until the summer and then walk out of the door for free, having already signed elsewhere. Supporters will manage the first part of that sentence; it is the second they will struggle with.
Federico de los Santos and a teammate said things this week that will take longer than a week to unsay. It was not about football, and both of them play on Saturday.
There is a particular warmth a ground reserves for a 16-year-old it feels ownership of. Benjamín Ramírez has it now, and everything he does for the rest of his time here will be measured against the goodwill he was handed for free.
Mitre and Rosario Central have settled on $310.0K. The rest belongs to the player and his agent, and a supporter who has watched one of these before knows not to buy the shirt yet.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Mitre can pretend not to have heard.
The approach was made and the answer came back in a sentence. There is no number on the table because there was no number that would have been enough.
Squad29 Dec 2031
Maxim Telesh 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.
13 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.
Ramiro Pral 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.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Alexis Alvez 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.
Some afternoons a goalkeeper is the team. 13 saves, several of them the sort nobody expects to see stopped, and a scoreline that flatters everybody in front of him.
8 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.
Rodrigo González and a teammate went at it, and not about football. Training grounds are small places and a long season makes them smaller.
Squad24 Mar 2031
Alexis Alvez 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.
Brutal, unambiguous and, for all the horror of the moment, usually less career-shaped than the ligament everybody fears more. 52 days, a clean timeline, and a return date somebody can actually plan around.
Some afternoons a goalkeeper is the team. 7 saves, several of them the sort nobody expects to see stopped, and a scoreline that flatters everybody in front of him.
Rodrigo González and a teammate said things this week that will take longer than a week to unsay. It was not about football, and both of them play on Saturday.
8 goals. Both benches spent the second half looking at each other rather than at the pitch. Purists will complain about Mitre and Banfield in equal measure; everybody else had a wonderful time.
Senior shirt numbers handed to boys the coaches have known since they were twelve. Most will not make it and all of them have already done the hard part.
There is no fee, no unveiling and no agent on the steps. Pedro Muñoz has been at this club since he was a boy and is now, formally, one of the first-team squad — which for a local readership beats any signing of any size.
Clubs spend fortunes looking for players and occasionally find one down the corridor. Martín Lombardi is that, and the reception he gets on his first appearance will be different in kind from the one any signing receives.
Clubs spend fortunes looking for players and occasionally find one down the corridor. Benjamín Ramírez is that, and the reception he gets on his first appearance will be different in kind from the one any signing receives.
In brief
MarketOne of our own: Gringo joins the Mitre first team