'I feel so blessed': Mo Eisa on his journey from Sudan to the Football League
On the edge of the Cotswolds there is another Mohamed making waves in red and white. Unlike Mo Salah, 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.
“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.”
Eisa earned a 12-month contract but after four goals in his first three games he signed fresh terms until 2020. His 22 Football League goals this season are a club record in a Football League campaign.
On leaving Greenwich in search of full-time football he was rejected by league clubs worried about his strength and slender frame. He trained with Boreham Wood and says he would “probably have played in the Conference with them this season” if Cheltenham had not come
calling.
Twenty-four goals later it has been a fairytale first season for Eisa, who lives round the corner from the training ground with three of his team-mates, Jamie Grimes, Jaanai Gordon and Emmanuel Onariase, in a flat owned by the chairman, Paul Baker.
His success has not gone unnoticed by supporters at Cheltenham Lido either. “I went to the pool after a game with Nige [Atangana] and Ilias [Chatzitheodoridis] for a recovery session and we saw a bunch of kids shouting: ‘Mo, Mo, Mo!’ I like all of that interaction. It was good. It’s a totally new thing for me but it’s a nice feeling to have, people recognising you on the streets and stuff like that.”
For Eisa, who spoke little English on arrival in London, turning professional has brought many challenges. He has risen to most, referencing a shift in training intensity, learning how to deal with a nine-game goal “drought” and shaking those nerves.
“In non-league there were sometimes 50 fans maybe, and now it’s around a couple of thousand, some games even more – like against Coventry it was 7,000,” the 23-yearold says. The watershed moment was seemingly when West Ham United came to town in the EFL Cup, a month after he signed. “That was live on TV as well,” he says. “I had never been on TV. I’ve recorded that and sometimes I’ll go back and watch that again. If I am having a bad spell, I go back and remind myself of what I was doing before.”
The Eisas, like the Sessegnons or Ayews, are one of few pairs of siblings in professional football and they are immensely proud of each other’s journey. Mo went to Wembley to support Abo in the Checkatrade Trophy final this month and they often play Fifa on Xbox together. At the same time they are very different; Abo finishes his biomedical science degree at Brunel University after exams next month. “My brother’s very smart; I wasn’t smart,” he says. “He always wanted to do football but he had to do education as well and I was just focused on football.”
As kids, they shared a competitive edge. “Funnily enough every position I was, and I started off in centre midfield, he would then be in centre midfield,” he says, smiling. “I would move out to left wing, then so would he, and I’d go to striker, and he’d be a striker. But now he is a winger. On our summer breaks in London we would have kickabouts and we used to play with and against each other. He wasn’t as good then if I’m being honest but I have seen him rise up and that’s why he’s got his move. I knew I was going to get my chance eventually and he knew he was going to get his.”
Talking points
• Jack Lester became the 48th Premier League or EFL managerial casualtythis season on Monday after exiting Chesterfield. Those numbers put the manager-of-the-moment Danny Cowley’s recent comments into perspective. “We’re very careful not to get ahead of ourselves and run before we can walk,” he said of himself and his brother, Nicky.
• Pete Winkelman has apologised to supporters for MK Dons’ disastrous season after sacking the manager, Dan Micciche, on Sunday. “I thought going down from the Championship was bad but to be in this position is just unthinkable,” the club’s chairman said, with the team in grave danger of being relegated from League One.
• And welcome back to Macclesfield Town who ended their six-year exile from the Football League after winning the National League.