Sena pledges to thank his backers by being success
Sena leapt out the passenger door with the car still in gear after spotting the Partick Thistle kitman outside Firhill on Friday morning.
Ten minutes earlier he’d collected the Home Office letter from his lawyer telling him he’d been granted leave to remain in the UK.
The Senegal-born 18-year-old said: “The kitman has been asking every day if the letter had arrived ... ‘Are we ever going to be alive to witness this?’”
The Championship club have had the Pollok defender in at training for a year and kept a contract waiting until he was able to sign.
Thistle even put in a submission with his application as chief executive Gerry Britton and local MP Paul Sweeney got behind his case.
Britton said: “We were committed to Sena as a person and a footballer and helping him to have the opportunity to become a professional footballer regardless of where he was from and his circumstances.
“For us, he’s a footballer. He stayed up the road, he was a local kid that we saw something in and we wanted to do everything we could to support him to achieve his dream.”
Sena couldn’t thank Thistle and Pollok enough for sticking with him even as his performances suffered from the mental strain of what was unfolding off the pitch.
Although it’s the constant support of former Lok Under-19 coach Bill
Reside – whom he first met when he was 16 – that earned special mention.
The teenager said: “The only way I can repay Bill is not by money or stuff like that – the only way is to go and make it at Thistle and in the game. And I’ll do whatever it takes to do that.”
MailSport had contacted the Home Office about his application, which has seen him granted “limited leave to remain” on the basis of his private life with this able to become indefinite after 10 years, on August 31.
We were told “due to their potential complexity, there are no processing timescales for this type of case”.
A letter dated the following day, September 1, was sent to his lawyer confirming his application had been successful.