‘He’s watched everything’: Casemiro back after longest month on sidelines

I n an office on Calle Serrano, Madrid, Óscar Ribot is scrolling through a video on his phone, pausing it at the point where Carlos Henrique Casemiro’s boot rolls over the top of the ball and into the shin of Southampton’s midfielder Carlos Alcaraz. Saved in a WhatsApp group called ‘CaseRed,’ it is one of the images he and his team discussed using to challenge the four-game ban the Brazilian received after being sent off.

Manchester United decided not to appeal, which is why the games on the calendar on the desk are struck through. Until it reaches Thursday.

After almost a month absent, Casemiro will be available to play again, against Sevilla. On Sunday, against Nottingham Forest, he will return to the Premier League. Alcaraz, who had asked to swap shirts a few minutes before the Brazilian crashed into him, was among those offering consolation, but there was none. Casemiro left the pitch at Old Trafford in tears.

“Taking football away from Case is like taking food from his table, it’s like he can’t live, can’t breathe,” says Ribot, whose Best of You agency represents the midfielder. “He wakes up thinking about football and goes to bed thinking about football. He watches hundreds of games: any team, any league. I’ve seen him watch Chinese games because there is always some detail. He says he won’t be a coach, but he will. He’s already one in a footballer’s body. This month, he’s watched everything, calculating the points needed and the days left.”

It is not a situation Casemiro has been used to. The joke about forgetting to pack his invisibility cloak alongside the shin pads, hyperbaric chamber, electric recovery boots and all those medals almost writes itself, but he didn’t find it funny. In a decade at Real Madrid,