You know, there's always a catch in the return of the prodigal son. How do they paint it for us? A choir, sunbeams through stained glass, tears in the scouts' eyes and the closing caption: "He's back." But in the case of Tamerlan Musaev and CSKA it looks more and more like getting back together with your ex only because she learnt to cook borscht on a business trip to Kaliningrad. The borscht may be edible, but you were expecting foie gras.
Listen, Musaev at Baltika was wonderful. He was the king of the air there, master of the Baltic draughts, a man who turned chaos into points. 19 goals, 14 assists - that's almost a symphony! But let's be honest: what looks like high fashion in Kaliningrad can, on Moscow's Leningradsky Prospekt, sometimes look like grandad's jumper - well made, warm, but they won't let you on the catwalk in it.
CSKA, after all, wasn't buying just a forward. They were buying "one of ours". And "one of ours" in our football is often a letter of safe passage. He's ours, he's Army through and through, hands off him for the time being. He'll bite the dirt for the badge. And Tamerlan bites. God, how he bites! He runs as if there's a perpetual motion engine hidden in his boots and a furious lion behind him. He presses, he battles, he generates so much kinetic energy around himself that you could power a small village outside Moscow with it.
But here's the snag: football is still about goals, not about fitness badges.
When we look at the statistics - 4 goals in 27 matches - we don't see numbers. We see emptiness. It's as if a chef in an expensive restaurant put on a spectacular show in front of you: juggled knives, set the brandy alight in the pan, sprinkled salt through the air with a flourish and drove the audience to ecstasy... and then served you a completely empty, if very hot, plate. Was there a show? There was. Did the chef sweat? And how. But you leave the table as hungry as when you arrived.
And those 34% of duels won? Have mercy, that's a catastrophe. For a centre-forward at a club with pretensions that's not a statistic, it's a cry for help. It looks as if the ball, for Musaev, isn't a working tool but a bar of soap in the shower: there it is in your hands, and a second later it's slipped out and flown off to the opponent.
Tamerlan's tragedy is that he ended up hostage to the Army club's anaemia. CSKA spent so long looking for "the one true number nine", got burnt so often on overseas wizards, that it decided: "Let's take one of ours, at least he won't run away." And he didn't run away. He stands honestly at his post. But that post - in the centre of the attack - demands not sentry duty but daring, cheek and, forgive me, finishing craft.
Musaev right now is a sort of forward-therapist. He listens a lot, walks alongside a lot, empathises with the attack, but he can't perform the operation. His scalpel has gone blunt.
And as long as CSKA explains the absence of goals with "an enormous volume of dirty work", we'll keep watching this strange picture: a boy from a good family, back home, trying very hard to please his parents, but all he manages is to stamp very loudly on the parquet. And in football it's sometimes better to stamp less, explain the failures with volume less - and just once put the ball precisely in the corner.
