29 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. Estoril Praia lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
The clubs have settled the fee and he has settled his wages. What remains is a medical and a photograph, and around Estoril Praia people have started saying his name in the past tense.
Centre-halves are allowed forward twice a season and are judged on what they do when they get there. Antef Tsoungui scored, was marked 7.67, and got back before anybody noticed he had gone.
The deal with Olimpia is done in every sense but the one that puts him on the pitch. Nothing goes wrong at this stage, except on the occasions when it does.
Fotis Ioannidis 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.
Every footballer has an answer to the question about his boyhood club, and most of them never get to act on it. Rafael Porfírio has, at Estoril Praia, and the first month will show what that does to a man.
52 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Estoril Praia lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Estoril Praia can pretend not to have heard.
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.
“Some decisions take a long time. This one took ten minutes, and most of that was finding a pen.” Antef Tsoungui and Estoril Praia agree another 3 years.
Jordan Holsgrove 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.
Successful dribbles: 18. He went past people as if he had been told there was a prize for it, and by the end the full-back had stopped pretending to try.
15 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.
It is never announced and it is entirely visible: the biggest afternoons of the season keep containing him. A press box works this out long before anybody at the club confirms a word of it.
12 attempts, none of them in. He got into the right places all afternoon, which is the hard part, and did the easy part badly — and that is the version of a bad day a manager can live with.
The team sheet says it in public every week until it changes. The only version of being dropped a footballer cannot argue with, and the one he takes hardest.
“It is not the end of the world and it is not good enough. Both of those are true.” The manager, after a 0‑0 draw, said the honest thing and then went to say it again inside.