The words a physio says slowly. 20 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.
Two goals and a mark of 8.79 to go with them. Strikers are judged on afternoons like this one and remembered for far fewer of them than people imagine.
Terms are settled between the clubs and the rest is paperwork and a photograph. Around Egaleo they have already started talking about him in the past tense.
Thanasis Karamanis 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 figure at which a wage bill stops being ambitious and becomes the reason nothing else is possible, and this club has reached it. Nothing is left over for a transfer, a stand or a rainy afternoon.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Tobi Alagbe was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
He found out with everybody else, an hour before kick-off, from a sheet of paper on a wall. Nobody at Egaleo pretended it was anything other than a decision about him.
34 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. Egaleo lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
Tobi Alagbe 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.
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.
Every squad has one of these fixtures for somebody every season. This one is Ulrich N'Nomo’s: the club that knew him first, the supporters who will decide in the first minute whether to applaud, and Egaleo needing him to play as if none of it matters.
“The manager did not use many words, and he did not need to.” Dimitris Goumas has his answer from Egaleo; what he does with it is the next window’s story.
Nobody at Egaleo will say this on the record and the team sheets have been saying it for weeks. There is a small group in every squad who get picked when the fixture is difficult, and he has joined it.
In brief
The dugoutThe manager makes Kostas Tabas a promise
71 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. Egaleo lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
It is not much of a headline and it is the reason players believe the next promise. Egaleo told Christos Belevonis something would happen and then it happened, which in this industry passes for remarkable.
18 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.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Maxime Pélican was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.