It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Molde this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad20 Jul 2043
Tijn Peters 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.
At 22 he is being sung about by people twice his age, which is an affection a signing has to earn over years and a local kid gets for turning up. It is also the hardest thing in football to live up to.
19 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.
61 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Molde lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Noah Bout 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.
75 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Molde lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
There is an age at which every good afternoon gets described as a throwback, which is unfair and also accurate. 8.09 at 35, and nobody on the pitch was better.
A defender on the scoresheet, which happens rarely enough that everybody in the ground remembers who took the corner. 1 for him, and a mark of 7.47 for the rest of it.
Fee agreed, terms agreed, medical booked. Alexander Odegaard will be somebody else’s player by the weekend, and around Molde the goodbyes have quietly begun.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Molde this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Noah Bout 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.
Nobody at the club will say out loud who this signing is for, which is how you know exactly who it is for. Alexander Poulsen has been brought in to take a shirt somebody is still wearing.
7 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.
Fee agreed, terms agreed, medical booked. Patrick Pedersen will be somebody else’s player by the weekend, and around Molde the goodbyes have quietly begun.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Adriano Jagušić 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.
Luigi Esposito 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.
124 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Molde lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Molde will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
The clubs have agreed terms, and what remains is formality: a medical, a photograph, a signature. Nobody at Molde is pretending he will be back in the shirt.
The phone has started ringing about Viktor Augustinsson again, and this time the name on the line is Aalesund. Molde are listening politely and promising nothing.
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Molde will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
There is an age at which every good afternoon gets described as a throwback, which is unfair and also accurate. 8.01 at 40, and nobody on the pitch was better.
The clubs have agreed terms, and what remains is formality: a medical, a photograph, a signature. Nobody at Molde is pretending he will be back in the shirt.
Gustav Nyheim 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 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.
There is a version of every career where the player ends up somewhere he chose rather than somewhere that chose him. Julius Lucena is living that version at Molde, and it tends to show in the first month.
Julius Lucena is 33 and has run out of things to prove. What he has left is where to stand, when to slow it down and what to say at half-time, and none of that is on a fitness chart.