The Guardian:On the edge of the Cotswolds there is another Mohamed making waves in red and white. Unlike Mo Salah,
The though, this is Mo Eisa’s first taste of professional football after swapping the Ryman South for League Two with Cheltenham Town last summer. Eisa is making history in his maiden season, all the more impressive given that 12 months ago he was at eighth-tier Greenwich Borough, giving Godalming Town the runaround in front of 156 spectators.
Finding the net is in the family; Eisa’s younger brother, Abobaker, signed for Shrewsbury Town in January after impressing at Wealdstone. At 3.13pm last Saturday Mo and Abo scored in the same minute, the latter getting his first for the club, an eerie oddity and another step on an extraordinary journey for brothers who left Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, for Camden at the age of nine.
“Some people may not have got out of that situation that I was in, so I feel blessed,” Mo Eisa says. “They have obviously had a few issues and civil wars. My family was there last summer actually but now it is more settled down and everything’s better in a way. Coming to London and to do what I am doing now compared with a few years ago, I wouldn’t have thought it was possible.
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“Growing up, from a young age I was playing football with just friends, not for a proper team and that’s a different experience. We used to play every day and I got a couple of skills from one of my cousins because he was pretty good. The facilities were way different; it’s not like how it is here. When we moved to London we had astroturfs and in Sudan we didn’t really have that. It was just normal pitches, grass pitches with not a lot of grass on. But that was home.”
He joined ProTouch, an academy based in Islington, at 14 and had trials at Norwich City and Southend United before joining Oxford United as an apprentice. But via Dartford, Corinthian and a loan spell at Leatherhead, it was at Greenwich, managed by the former Millwall striker Gary Alexander, that his prolific form – 57 goals across two seasons – more than pricked the ears of Pete Johnson, Cheltenham’s chief scout and the manager Gary’s brother, who offered Eisa a day’s trial. Not that it went to plan. “I was probably just trying too hard,” Eisa says at the club’s training pavilion. “Everything was going wrong; I didn’t score, I didn’t do anything. I was nervous but luckily they invited me back for three days and I did well.”
read more: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/apr/25/mo-eisa-cheltenham-sudan-brother-abo-shrewsbury