Mechelen have their first win of the season. Benito Raman is the match winner. I read the rest on Monday, at the chip shop, in my weekly. There was a hug.
Fred Vanderbiest, the coach, and Raman embraced after the match. Vanderbiest told Voetbalkrant: “That’s just pure friendship. We are open and honest with each other.” Raman also hugged a lot of team-mates in the dug-out. He says he and Vanderbiest do it often.
In 1980, you raised an arm. The coach nodded. Nobody asked what the nod meant. I’m not criticising. I’m comparing.
To be fair, it had been a busy week. Patrick Goots had said Mechelen certainly needed Raman and that Vanderbiest had to patch things up. The coach answers: “When people ask whether the creases have been ironed out: there have never been any creases.” According to him, everyone thought there was a falling-out because Raman wasn’t playing. That’s wrong, he says. Raman knows perfectly well why he starts or doesn’t.
Then there are the nicknames. Each has one for the other, in Dutch. I’m not writing them out. In my day, we had nicknames too. We didn’t give them at a press conference. There was no press conference, as it happens. There was the clubhouse bar, and silence.
My dressing room doesn’t need a press conference, it has the club delegate.
Raman said: “I know very well myself what it’s like to sit on the bench and not play.” That’s a sentence I could have read in 1976. The rest, the hug explained, the creases that never existed, needs a press release. Note that I’m not against friendship. I’m against friendship with a running commentary. Well. It’s the times.
It’s true, we checked: Voetbalkrant.
