His dad Modesto was a winger who played for Deportivo de La Coruña, but only once – in 1984 when Spain’s professional footballers went on strike – and for Juventud Cambados, the club owned by notorious narco Sito Miñanco. Born in Mos, a place of 15,000 people alongside Vigo, the way he tells it, Brais’s parents bought the house he grew up in because he, aged five at the time, liked the look of the pitch across the road. He has a level and a quality that’s brutal. Asked if Brais would break his personal best, teammate Alex Remiro laughed. Take away the penalties and even Borja doesn’t have as many as Brais. Already more than in the whole of last season, just three off his best-ever campaign.
Panda house plus#
Eight weeks into a new season at a new club, it was also his fourth game scoring in a row and took him to five league goals plus another at Old Trafford in the Europa League – “revenge”, he says, for Celta’s semi-final elimination in May 2017. On Sunday evening, Brais slid in to steer the ball through Gero Rulli’s legs and give Real Sociedad a 1-0 victory over Villarreal that took them to a fifth consecutive win – three in La Liga, two in Europe – and level with the Champions League positions.
Everyone knows about Borja Iglesias, the now-Betis striker who was the oldest and took the Panda nickname with him, but he always insists he does so in honour of all of them and if only Robert Lewandowski has scored more than him, he only has one more than former teammate Brais Méndez. The only two to have played in Spain’s top flight. Six years on from their finest season together, the culmination of a journey they mostly spent cracking up on the bus, only one is left in the first team in Vigo – and Kevin Vázquez hasn’t appeared yet this season – but look near the top of primera or glance at the goalscoring charts, and although they too had to move, two more are still there tearing it up.
0 kommentar(er)
