“Things were said to me before I signed. I am not going to repeat them, but I remember all of them.” Guria have not answered, which is an answer of sorts.
Irakli Siradze 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.
16 times he got in the way of something. Centre-halves get written about when they make mistakes and ignored when they do not, so an afternoon like this needs saying out loud: he is the reason the scoreline reads as it does.
The crowd waited for a goal that never came. Dinamo Tbilisi defended in numbers and left with what they came for, and the two sides could be playing still without troubling a scorer.
In brief
SquadLucas Meurer has become a man the manager trusts
15 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Guria lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Nobody makes a documentary about a hamstring and everybody in the game fears one. Guria will be careful with the return date, because the second one is always worse than the first.
Davit Maisashvili 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.
In brief
SquadWords at Guria training over how hard people work
54 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Guria lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
“This is not anger. I have thought about it for months, and nothing that has happened lately changed my mind.” The request is on a desk at Guria, and it is not being withdrawn.
There is an age at which every good afternoon gets described as a throwback, which is unfair and also accurate. 8.28 at 37, and nobody on the pitch was better.
490 appearances across 8 seasons in one shirt. Nobody builds a career like that on purpose any more; it happens to a certain kind of footballer at a certain kind of club.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Guria this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
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 manager did not use many words, and he did not need to.” Levan Vardiashvili has his answer from Guria; what he does with it is the next window’s story.
13 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.