Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Apollon will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
Fee agreed, wages agreed, and Ermis waiting with a shirt. Nobody at Apollon is pretending otherwise, and the supporters have stopped asking whether and started asking when.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Apollon can pretend not to have heard.
Fee agreed, terms agreed, medical booked. Brandon Thomas will be somebody else’s player by the weekend, and around Apollon the goodbyes have quietly begun.
Konstantinos Balogiannis 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.
At 22 he is doing things this season that he could not do last season, and doing them every week. Form comes and goes; this has stayed long enough to be called something else.
7 arrivals, an average age nobody would call a squad, and a set of parents being shown around a building their sons will spend more time in than at home. The scouting has already happened; today is only the paperwork.
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.
21 home matches unbeaten. Visiting sides arrive already talking about the atmosphere, which is usually the sign that they have half-lost before kickoff.
Qualification is secured, and next season the big floodlit nights are continental ones. For the players it is a stage; for the accounts it is a lifeline; for the supporters it is passports.
There is an age at which every good afternoon gets described as a throwback, which is unfair and also accurate. 9.67 at 35, and nobody on the pitch was better.
The kind of year that ends with a name being read out in a hall. Apollon had the benefit of it every week and now have the problem of everybody else knowing.
4 wins on the spin now, and the question has changed from whether the run ends to who ends it. Confidence like this cannot be bought; it has to be earned exactly this way.
41 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Apollon lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
A bone, which is the one injury with a calendar attached. Apollon will name a return date and, unusually for this business, will probably be right about it.
Two goals and a mark of 9.07 to go with them. Strikers are judged on afternoons like this one and remembered for far fewer of them than people imagine.
At 34 he is supposed to be managing his minutes. Instead he was marked 8.09 and looked, for ninety minutes, exactly like the player everybody remembers.
The clubs have agreed terms, and what remains is formality: a medical, a photograph, a signature. Nobody at Apollon is pretending he will be back in the shirt.
A bone, which is the one injury with a calendar attached. Apollon will name a return date and, unusually for this business, will probably be right about it.
15 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.
There is an age at which every good afternoon gets described as a throwback, which is unfair and also accurate. 7.90 at 33, and nobody on the pitch was better.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Ali Youssef was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Apollon this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
The first defeat in 5 matches. The manager will say it had to come; the dressing room will say it did not have to come against APOEL; the supporters will say both, in that order, all week.
AEL next, and the two sides the division is watching meet each other. Whoever wins will be told nothing is decided in the same breath as being congratulated.