Marked for Daniel Martinez
From our football correspondent
Upbeat
Match18 Jul 2037
3‑0, and the margin flattered nobody — it could have carried another goal or two without complaint. Afternoons like this are why people keep coming.
Squad20 Jul 2037
3 goals in one game. The first was taken well, the second was taken greedily, and by the third the crowd were simply waiting for him to get the ball.
Market20 Jul 2037
The offer was not close and it was refused without much discussion. Whether the second one is refused as quickly is another matter.
Player ratings20 Jul 2037
28 defensive actions and a clean sheet at the end of them. A defender's afternoon can only be told by what did not happen, which is why nobody makes a highlights package out of one and every manager in the division would take it.
Market20 Jul 2037
The general version of this complaint is that a player wants more. The specific version names the thing: he wants to walk out under floodlights against clubs from other countries, and he has stopped pretending otherwise.
Squad20 Jul 2037
Defences have started doubling up on Ángel Martínez
12 goals and a season average of 7.47 will do that. The space he used to find has gone; he keeps scoring anyway, which is the mark of the real thing.
Squad20 Jul 2037
Jairo Concha in a row with a teammate
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Caracas this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Market20 Jul 2037
The clubs have agreed terms, and what remains is formality: a medical, a photograph, a signature. Nobody at Caracas is pretending he will be back in the shirt.
Player ratings20 Jul 2037
Ninety minutes of Ángel Martínez at his very best
Marked 9.80. Players have careers without a single afternoon like this in them, and he has just had one in front of everybody at Caracas.
Back issues
From our football correspondent
Uneasy
Squad31 Mar 2036
A knee injury of the worst kind for Daniel Martinez
16 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Caracas lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Squad31 Mar 2036
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.
Squad31 Mar 2036
Jairo Concha in a row with a teammate
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Caracas this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad31 Mar 2036
Christian Larotonda 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.
Player ratings31 Mar 2036
There is a version of this player everybody suspected was in there, and on this evidence it is. 9.00, and no argument anywhere in the ground.
Player ratings31 Mar 2036
There was one mistake and it ended in the net. Defenders are judged on the worst thing they did rather than on the eighty-nine minutes either side of it, which is unfair and is also the job.
From our football correspondent
Steady
Squad24 Mar 2036
Daniel Martinez damages knee ligaments — 24 days out
The words a physio says slowly. 24 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.
Squad24 Mar 2036
“I was told what my role would be, and I signed on that basis. It has not happened.” A grievance with a date attached is the hardest kind to settle.
Squad24 Mar 2036
Jairo Concha 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.
Player ratings24 Mar 2036
Marked 8.66 — the sort of number a correspondent writes down twice to be sure. Everything he tried came off, and what he did not try was not worth trying.
Match22 Mar 2036
Conceding is one thing; the response is what tells you about a dressing room. Ángel Martínez had Caracas level again within 3 minutes, and Trujillanos never got to play with a lead at all.
Squad24 Mar 2036
The manager makes an example of Lionel Paz
“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.
Player ratings24 Mar 2036
1 error, one goal, and a night in front of the same three seconds. He will see it tonight, tomorrow and probably in February, and everybody who has played knows exactly which frame he keeps stopping on.
Match22 Mar 2036
It needed Ángel Martínez to find the net to bring anything home at all: 1‑1 against Trujillanos, and half the dressing room will call it a point won.
Player ratings24 Mar 2036
Shots: 11. Goals: none. The chances were there and they were good ones, and they went into the stand, the goalkeeper's arms and the side netting in roughly that order.