While it’s an old, inevitable line, to liken Zubimendi to Xabi Alonso is not entirely incorrect. As smooth as ever, Silva looks swifter, fitter. Signed from Real Madrid after loans at Getafe, Villarreal and Mallorca, Kubo has a freedom and the teammates that allow him to be the player he was always supposed to be. Or, as Martín Zubimendi puts it, “a kind of diamond inside where we play the ball a lot”: one that has him at at the base, David Silva at the top and Brais and Mikel Merino either side. Imanol Alguacil has (re)constructed a side around left footers, a sort of 4-1-3-2 or 4-1-3-1-1. “You analyse, see the plans, the style, the players and think: this is made for me to land on my feet.” I don’t think I’ll need a big period of adaptation,” he said. “What the manager wants and what the club is like is very close to what I like as a footballer. Real Sociedad fit “like a ring on a finger”, he said: a club quietly getting on with doing pretty much everything well, a team already playing good football. Living just outside Donosti with two gigantic dogs, this is the perfect place, a team that feels made for him. Or so it goes.Īlthough he said that departing “hurt”, it suited him even more. This summer, when Real Sociedad offered €14m for him, it suited Celta. There had been “ups and downs” with the fans, Brais admitted. He sought psychological support when he felt himself struggling to climb out of the “well”, admitting: “You get in a rut and your head doesn’t stop.” The arrival of Chaco Coudet as coach in 2020 helped pull him from that and he still talks to his therapist, although the accusation he was cold, a little soft lingered. Yet while he has played more than 30 games a season for four years, his personal progression was uneven. He had played only five full games – fewer than 30 in total – when he got a Spain call-up, scoring on his debut in a 1-0 win over Bosnia and Herzegovina. A left-footed No 10, he was the first of the Panda Team to get a senior debut. There, he said, they had “a fucking great time”. He was good, they said, but Brais was better, blessed with something special.īrais joined Villarreal’s youth system at 13, but was too far from home and soon returned, joining Celta instead. 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. 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.
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