Fernando Gomez, former FC Porto striker, has passed away

The greatest scorer in the history of FC Porto died. What remains are the goals and eternal fascination of the Dragons’ finest, one of the great workers in the deluge of club regeneration in the ’70s and ’80s.

Fernando Gomez was not the best player in FC Porto’s history. It was the most symbolic of all. With due respect to Pinga, Araújo, Falcao or Jardel, Gomez was the greatest goalscorer in Porto’s history and in that capacity also the standard-bearer for the club’s liberation and the revolution that took place in Portuguese football and sport. He left very young, at the age of 66. He leaves the work that immortalizes him. It’s a legend.

It was a devastating cancer that took hold of one of FC Porto’s greatest stars, twice finishing top scorer in all European competitions. This is why he was so famous and always remembered as a golden “peputa”, a title he naturally stuck to and that everyone, including himself, had already received the baptism of the Nativity.

Whether it was from early childhood or not, surely the “bibota” soon showed an irresistible attraction to goals and objectives. He arrived at FC Porto at the age of 14, having spent the street and neighborhood football route which, at the time, ran for the best. In the Constitution and in Antas, Antonio Feliciano and Costa Soares, two outstanding coaches, quickly saw what they had there. Rare pearl. In three consecutive seasons, Fernando Gomez has been a hero, young and young. Collect hundreds of goals and reach the age of majority before the age of 18.

It still smelled like April, on September 8, 1974, when the 17-year-old was given a substitute in the main squad of FC Porto, in the heart of Studio das Antas, by Brazilian coach Emory Moreira. And what a start! He scored the two goals that defeated CUF (2-1). And they were just the first two of his 419 “orgasms,” as he called it. And it was right there that the pawn was also introduced to the unique festivities of the debutante, thrusting into the net and into the arms of the supporters, because this act is very physiological and well described, as is the extreme degree of intercourse with the ball.

The legislation was repeated again and again, again and again and always with renewed excitement. There have been 419 banderilhas in a 17-year career. In his 13 years at FC Porto, he became the club’s all-time leading goalscorer with 354 accurate shots. He played for two years (1980-1982) in Spain for Gijón, scoring 16 goals there in 33 matches and between multiple injuries, before returning for a second stint with FC Porto and saving Ma. He finished his career at Sporting (1989-1991), where he scored 38 goals in 79 matches. He still scored 11 goals in 47 matches for the national team.

Gomez possessed an impressive variety of resources and, above all, a unique heading technique, six times the winner of the Bola de Prata award, which distinguished the best scorer of the tournament. He was a predator of the territory, with an infallible instinct. “My job was not to score beautiful goals, it was to score,” he said himself, in one of the last interviews JN was given, on the day he celebrated his 60th birthday.

At that time, in the seventies and eighties, which preceded the entry into force of television, this fund that also changed football, which also preceded the adoption of Bosman’s superlative law, in those glorious times for radio, Amaro reports. and Quadrante Norte, he also became the star of Porto. In addition to scoring in the series, Gomez was a playmaker with plenty of charisma. The fashionable haircut, the hair blown in the air, in this “pop-rock” air, made thousands and thousands of new Porto players, in the stickiness of the community that collapsed the Andrades complex and made the Dragão an icon of world football.

Because it was all this heritage, the heritage of the great champion – world champion, European champion, five-time national champion, three Super Cups, three FA Cups, the European Super Cup … – and the symbol of identity that FC Porto and Portuguese football lost. .