“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 The request is on a desk at Olimpija Ljubljana, and it is not being withdrawn.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Olimpija Ljubljana this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad25 Feb 2030
Dino Kojić falls out with a teammate over standards
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.
Nobody at Olimpija Ljubljana 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.
“I have given everything here and I need a new challenge.” The request is formal, and the relationship will never be quite the same again.
Player ratings27 Nov 2028
Nik Belovič, 20, plays like he has been here for years — 8.51
A mark of 8.51 means one thing beside a twenty-nine-year-old's name and something else entirely beside a 20-year-old's. Nobody at the ground needed telling which this was.
Marko Brest 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.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Dino Kojić 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.
At 20 he is being sung about by people twice his age, which is an affection a signing has to earn over years and a local kid gets for turning up. It is also the hardest thing in football to live up to.
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.
In brief
Player ratingsThe chances came and went for Dmytro Zudin
27 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Olimpija Ljubljana lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Olimpija Ljubljana will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
“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 Olimpija Ljubljana, and it is not being withdrawn.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Olimpija Ljubljana this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.