Luis Binks: From Montreal Impact to Scotland's Defense
Luis Binks sits in the shade of the palm trees at La Manga, Scotland gear on, captain of Brondby at 25 and on the brink of a first cap. The setting feels dreamy enough. His route here? Even more so.
He is one of eight uncapped players in Sebastien Pocognoli’s first Scotland squad, a fresh batch of hopefuls thrown into the mix after Grant Hanley and John Souttar were cast aside when the Belgian replaced Steve Clarke. A space has opened right in the centre of that defence. Binks is charging straight at it.
A grandparent from Dunbar gives him his Scottish thread. The rest of the tapestry is far less conventional.
He goes back to February and March 2020, the early weeks of his time at Montreal Impact in MLS. He was 18, leaving Tottenham after a childhood in their system.
“I'd been at Tottenham since I was very young, but I just wanted to go and play first-team football. 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.”
That desire took him across the Atlantic. To Montreal. To a dressing room run by Thierry Henry.
He had barely unpacked before the world shut down.
“I'd signed in February and then we went into Covid lockdown in March,” Binks says. “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.
“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’.”
The Ritz-Carlton. Five stars. 129 rooms. Two guests: Henry and a teenage centre-half trying to prove he belonged.
“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.
“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.”
The way he tells it now, Henry almost sounds like any team-mate. He isn’t, of course.
“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.
“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.
“I owe a lot to him because he gave me my first chance in senior football.”
From late-night pizza runs with a legend in an empty Ritz to a fight for a Scotland debut in the Spanish sun, Binks has already lived a career’s worth of stories. Now he wants the next one to be written in dark blue, in the heart of Pocognoli’s defence against Slovenia on Saturday.
