Luis Binks' Journey from Montreal to Scotland Debut

Luis Binks sits under the palm trees of La Manga, Scotland training in the Spanish sun for a few days, and starts talking. Every footballer has a tale, but his veers into the surreal.

At 25, the Brondby centre-half and captain is on the brink. He is driving hard for a first Scotland cap against Slovenia on Saturday, a vacancy having opened up in the middle of Sebastien Pocognoli’s defence since Grant Hanley and John Souttar were cut loose when the Belgian replaced Steve Clarke.

Binks, eligible through a grandparent from Dunbar, is one of eight uncapped players in the new manager’s squad. Eight fresh faces. Eight fresh backstories. His involves Covid, Montreal, and Thierry Henry in an empty five-star hotel.

He rewinds to early 2020, those first weeks at Montreal Impact in MLS. He was 18.

He had walked away from Tottenham, the club he had been at since he was a boy. “I just wanted to go and play first-team football,” he recalls. That was the obsession. Get out of the bubble. Escape the academy loop.

“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.”

The test took him to Canada, where his manager was one of the greatest forwards of all time. Thierry Henry. A legend on the touchline, watching a teenager trying to prove he belonged.

Binks signed in February. By March, the world had shut down.

“I'd signed in February and then we went into Covid lockdown in March,” he 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.”

Montreal closed in on itself. Borders, streets, even hotel doors. Binks suddenly had nowhere to stay.

“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 in downtown Montreal. A five-star bolt-hole with 129 rooms. For a while, only two people lived there: Thierry Henry and Luis Binks.

“I'd go for runs in the morning and he'd be sat in the reception on his own,” Binks says. “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.”

The picture is almost absurd. Silent lobby, empty bar, a global icon killing time on an armchair while a teenage centre-half jogs through deserted streets.

Then there were the nights. “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?’,” Binks says.

So off they went. “There's me and him driving around Montreal looking for a pizza. It's a bit surreal, but that was how it was.”

He tells it now as if it were ordinary, but it wasn’t. It was Thierry Henry. “I'm saying it now like it's just anybody, but there's a big aura around him. I was nervous at the time,” Binks admits.

Nerves or not, he used the chance. He asked questions. Who was the best defender Henry had played with? Who was the toughest he’d faced? Why? What separated them from the rest?

“I asked him who's the best defender he's played with and against and why and it was a good time,” Binks says. The specifics blur with distance, but one name stuck.

“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.”

Campbell’s positioning. His power. His timing. The details came from a man who had spent his career trying to outwit defenders like that. Binks listened and stored it away.

“I owe a lot to him because he gave me my first chance in senior football,” he says.

From empty corridors in the Ritz-Carlton to a fight for a Scotland debut in La Manga, the journey has been anything but straight. Now comes the next test: can the lessons learned in lockdown with Thierry Henry carry him into the heart of Pocognoli’s new Scotland defence?