119 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Zenit lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
At 34 he is supposed to be managing his minutes. Instead he was marked 7.96 and looked, for ninety minutes, exactly like the player everybody remembers.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Zenit this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Strahinja Eraković 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.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Zenit this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Fee agreed, terms agreed, medical booked. Vladlen Danilov will be somebody else’s player by the weekend, and around Zenit the goodbyes have quietly begun.
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.
The clubs have agreed terms, and what remains is formality: a medical, a photograph, a signature. Nobody at Zenit is pretending he will be back in the shirt.
The offer from Orenburg for Sergey Volkov 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.
There is a version of every career where the player ends up somewhere he chose rather than somewhere that chose him. Birkir Þorsteinsson is living that version at Zenit, and it tends to show in the first month.
This is not cover and nobody is pretending it is. $1.2M has been paid because Birkir Þorsteinsson is straightforwardly better than what was already here, and the club has decided to stop waiting.
24 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Zenit lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Zenit this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
The phone has started ringing about Sergey Volkov again, and this time the name on the line is Orenburg. Zenit are listening politely and promising nothing.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Strahinja Eraković 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.
62 without defeat on their own grass. The pitch has not changed; the crowd has — louder earlier, and quicker to sense when the opposition would rather be somewhere else.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Zenit 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.
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 7.76 for the rest of it.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Zenit this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.