The words a physio says slowly. 15 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.
There are footballers who have a good season and footballers a season is remembered for, and the second kind get their names read out in a hall in the summer. Hapoel Beer Sheva will be quietly delighted and privately nervous.
There is a version of every career where the player ends up somewhere he chose rather than somewhere that chose him. Tal Cohen is living that version at Hapoel Beer Sheva, and it tends to show in the first month.
Terms are settled between the clubs and the rest is paperwork and a photograph. Around Hapoel Beer Sheva they have already started talking about him in the past tense.
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.
The words a physio says slowly. 33 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.
The run now stands at 4, and the questions being asked around Real Sociedad B are no longer polite ones.
Squad14 May 2046
Ola Visted 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.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Real Sociedad B this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Headers, blocks, tackles, interceptions — 18 of them, and not one goal behind him. The sort of performance that never makes a highlight reel and wins football matches.
Headers, blocks, tackles, interceptions — 17 of them, and not one goal behind him. The sort of performance that never makes a highlight reel and wins football matches.
In brief
Player ratingsThe afternoon belonged to Erik Ekdal
114 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Real Sociedad B lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Position 20 and 9 points, and the table gets read bottom-up in this part of town. The calendar has stopped being a schedule and started being a countdown.
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 7.95 for the rest of it.
Terms are settled between the clubs and the rest is paperwork and a photograph. Around Real Sociedad B they have already started talking about him in the past tense.
Ola Visted 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. Rosindo Zanni 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.
A 3‑2 win over Cultural Leonesa, earned rather than given, and the sort of afternoon that sends everyone home talking about next week instead of this one.
Marked 8.10 — 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.
121 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Real Sociedad B lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
9 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.
“Some decisions take a long time. This one took ten minutes, and most of that was finding a pen.” Rosindo Zanni and Real Sociedad B agree another 2 years.
Fee agreed, terms agreed, medical booked. David Almeida will be somebody else’s player by the weekend, and around Real Sociedad B the goodbyes have quietly begun.
The offer from Granada for Alejandro Pérez was heard out and sent back the same day. First bids are rarely meant to succeed; they are meant to find out how loudly the door closes.
“The easiest signature of my career.” Stephen Murphy and Real Sociedad agree another 5 years, and the manager can plan around him rather than about him.
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Marcus Kulusevski is 19, and the version of him training now would not have got into the side he was in a year ago.
Ylies Ounissi 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.