Mikel Merino said he was proud to take the armband and lead us to victory, delivering a captain’s performance to help beat Ipswich 4-2 in the Carabao Cup.<\/p>\n
Our Spaniard bagged a goal and an assist in the third round triumph at Portman Road and after the display, Mikel said it was an honour to lead us out.<\/p>\n
“It\u2019s a huge honour,” he said. “I\u2019m so proud, and to represent this club in this way, wearing the armband – many legends have done it before me. To me it\u2019s happiness and I try to do the best thing I can to represent this club, and I know how big it is to wear the armband, so I\u2019m really happy.”<\/p>\n
Mikel produced a fine chip over the top to help Noni Madueke score before placing one in off the cap off a fine night in the middle of the park.<\/p>\n
Talking us through his contributions, he said: “I think the assist was high pressure on the team, where I\u2019m really alive to find that second ball and find Noni, and then he finishes with a really nice finish, and then the goal is a really good action from the team in the last third – when I get the ball, I can open the first touch and then just put it where the \u2018keeper couldn\u2019t get, so very, very happy, always good to be on the scoresheet, and will keep looking to score more goals.”<\/p>\n
The game saw Max Dowman score twice on his first start of the season. The 16-year-old became our second-youngest scorer in the competition, and Mkel was full of praise for his teammate.<\/p>\n
“He\u2019s an unbelievable talent, honestly, so young, so alive and you can see the joy in his eyes when he plays football.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Obviously, many things to improve – he\u2019s very young – he needs to keep listening and learning from the veterans, but we\u2019re here to support him and we\u2019re going to get him to the best version of himself, for sure.”<\/p>\n
Mikel showed his appreciation for our supporters when celebrating his goal. The supporters have been all over the UK in recent weeks and speaking ahout the supporters, he said: “It doesn\u2019t matter where we go, they\u2019re there, behind us, supporting, giving us all the strength, and that\u2019s what we need to keep doing big things – being a good union between supporters and players.<\/p>\n
“We\u2019re used to it [the schedule], we know that we have all day travelling. Sometimes it\u2019s hard to get away with family and friends, but it\u2019s our job, it\u2019s our passion, and we do it for the shirt. Yeah, tough challenges in front of us, but we\u2019re ready for them, for sure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mikel Merino said he was proud to take the armband and lead us to victory, delivering a captain’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":772226,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-772225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=772225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772225\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/772226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=772225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=772225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=772225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}