The words a physio says slowly. 144 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.
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Alavés will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
At 35 he is supposed to be managing his minutes. Instead he was marked 8.25 and looked, for ninety minutes, exactly like the player everybody remembers.
Fee agreed, terms agreed, medical booked. Jaime Flores will be somebody else’s player by the weekend, and around Alavés the goodbyes have quietly begun.
Antoniu Roca 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.
Ask anyone on the way out what separated the sides and you will get one name: Nelson Deossa. 2‑1 against Oviedo, and the applause at the whistle was mostly his.
In brief
Player ratingsMaxim Kriushichev was on a different afternoon to everybody else
Boardroom91% of the income goes out in wages at Alavés
31 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Alavés lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Alavés will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
“Things were said to me before I signed. I am not going to repeat them, but I remember all of them.” Alavés have not answered, which is an answer of sorts.
Fee agreed, terms agreed, medical booked. Jaime Flores will be somebody else’s player by the weekend, and around Alavés the goodbyes have quietly begun.
Antoniu Roca 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.
Every club in football pays most of what it earns to its players. Paying nearly all of it is a different arrangement, and it has ended the same way every time somebody has tried it.
37 days since the seat came open, a list of names doing the rounds, and nobody has signed anything. Every week this drags on the shortlist gets shorter.
Toni Martínez 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.
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Víctor Ortiz is 19, and the version of him training now would not have got into the side he was in a year ago.
Squad7 Aug 2034
Words at Alavés training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Andoni Gorosabel 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.
The coaching staff has emptied out entirely and there was nobody internal to promote, so the club has appointed a name almost none of its supporters will recognise. Clubs recover from this; none of them enjoy explaining it.
“Somebody has to pick the team on Saturday, and this week that is me.” An interim appointment with no promises attached, which is how most of them start.
“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 Alavés, and it is not being withdrawn.
“I have ambitions, and I would like the club to share them.” Nobody has asked to leave and nobody has been shown the door — but a player chooses that sentence carefully, and a boardroom hears it exactly as it was meant.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Alavés 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.
79 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Alavés lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
The club looked outside for a month, found nothing it preferred, and handed the job to the man who had been doing it anyway. He knows the building; now he has to prove he knows the rest.
Supporters who sing when it goes badly are supporters. Supporters who gather afterwards are a problem, and everybody inside the building knows which of the two this now is.
7.10, 1 on the scoresheet, and the specific comedy of a back-four player celebrating like somebody who does this every week. He does not, and that is exactly why the ground reacted the way it did.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Alavés this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.