At the weekend, we covered part of Heurelho Gomes’ interview with ESPN, where the Watford goalkeeper revealed the reason he became a footballer.
ESPN then released new bits from the chat they had with the player, and now, he’s talked a little about his adaptation to English football.
After playing for Cruzeiro in Brazil and PSV in Netherlands, Gomes joined Tottenham in a €9m deal in 2008. Despite moving to a big club, he claims he found a different reality there.
“I had a sequence like this: from when I arrived at Cruzeiro, until I arrived at Tottenham, ten titles. My career, always, at the beginning, winning, winning, winning,” Gomes told ESPN Brasil.
“So I arrived at Tottenham, in an interview I gave, they asked ‘what brought you here?’, I said ‘I want to win the English title’ (laughs). The press officers went… ‘no you can’t say that’. I said ‘how can’t I say that? I’m used to winning!’
“What were Tottenham at the time? Qualify for the Champions League. What were Watford? Get promoted, stabilise the team in the Premier League. And I had to start working this out in my head, that the big winners won’t always win titles. They will win what is really proposed to us.”
Gomes also talked about Luka Modric, who’s recently been elected as the best player in the world. The goalkeeper recalled that back during his time at Tottenham, the Croatian international was one of the few players who didn’t like the way Harry Redknapp would tell them to play.
Asked if he ever imagined Modric as the best in the world, Gomes said: “Yes. I did because he was a really differentiated player. Usually, our manager didn’t like to take the ball and come out playing. I had to take the ball and kick it to Peter Crouch, always.
“I got here, I had a lot of difficulty adapting because of the way I used to play. I came from Brazil, which is a very technical league, then I went to the Netherlands, which is a more technical league. It’s forbidden for the goalkeeper to hoof the ball. I came here, if I came out playing, the coach would want to grab me.
“But Modric was the player who would say ‘do not kick the ball’. ‘Pass the ball here and I’ll take care of it’. I’d pass the ball and he would not lose it.”
