Every footballer has a story, but not many are quite as trippy as the one Luis Binks tells while sitting among the palm trees of La Manga, Scotland’s training headquarters for a few days this week.<\/p>\n
At 25, the Brondby centre-half and captain is pushing hard for a Scotland debut against Slovenia on Saturday, a spot in the heart of Sebastien Pocognoli’s defence having opened up since Grant Hanley and John Souttar were jettisoned once the Belgian took over from Steve Clarke.<\/p>\n
Binks, with a grandparent from Dunbar, is among the eight uncapped players in the new manager’s squad.<\/p>\n
That’s a lot of new faces and a lot of new stories.<\/p>\n
Binks talks about the early weeks of his time at Montreal Impact in the MLS; February to March, 2020. He was 18 and recalls: “I’d been at Tottenham since I was very young, but I just wanted to go and play first-team football.<\/p>\n
“That was my biggest thing, to not get caught up in the whole youth system. I feel that if you get caught in that, it’s not real football. I wanted to test myself.”<\/p>\n
Which brought him to Montreal where his manager was the great Thierry Henry.<\/p>\n
“I’d signed in February and then we went into Covid lockdown in March,” Binks explains. “I hadn’t yet found an apartment. I was in one hotel and Thierry was in another. The one I was in was then shut down.<\/p>\n
“He was staying at the Ritz on his own. They wanted to move me to a hotel by the airport and I didn’t want to go because there was nothing there. It felt like prison, almost. One day I get a call from him, saying: ‘Do you want to move to where I am? You can go on the other floor’.”<\/p>\n
The Ritz-Carlton is a five-star retreat with 129 rooms. Henry and Binks were the only residents. <\/p>\n
“I’d go for runs in the morning and he’d be sat in the reception on his own. When I’d get back from the run, he’d still be sat there. I’d spend a few hours with him, just trying to pick his brains.<\/p>\n
“I remember one night I was sat in my room just playing PlayStation and he rings me and goes, ‘do you want to get a pizza?’. There’s me and him driving around Montreal looking for a pizza. It’s a bit surreal, but that was how it was.<\/p>\n
“I’m saying it now like it’s just anybody, but there’s a big aura around him. I was nervous at the time, but I asked him who’s the best defender he’s played with and against and why and it was a good time.<\/p>\n
“It’s a bit of a blur now, but I always remember him talking about Sol Campbell and just saying what made him great and how I could improve as a defender. <\/p>\n
“I owe a lot to him because he gave me my first chance in senior football.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every footballer has a story, but not many are quite as trippy as the one Luis Binks tells…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":905638,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":["post-905637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/905637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=905637"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/905637\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/905638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=905637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=905637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=905637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}