Porto’s top scorer has died. Only the goals and eternal passion of the most prestigious of all dragons, one of the great figures of the club renewal stream of the 1970s and 1980s, remain.
Fernando Gomes was not the best player in the history of Porto. He was the most symbolic of all. With due respect to Pinga, Araujo, Falcao or Jardel, Gomes was the greatest goalscorer in the annals of Porto and in that capacity also the flag bearer of the emancipation of the club and the revolution in football and Portuguese sport. He left very young, at the age of 66. He leaves a work that perpetuates him. This is a legend.
It was a lightning-fast cancer that claimed one of Porto’s greatest idols, twice top scorer in all European Championships. That is why he became famous and forever remembered as the golden “bibot”, a nickname that naturally stuck with him and which everyone, including himself, acquired already in the lullaby of baptism.
Whether he was from early childhood or not, it is certain that the “bibota” soon showed an irresistible craving for goals and goals. He arrived at FC Porto at the age of 14 after having completed the street and district football route which at the time filtered out the best. At Constitution and Antas, Antonio Feliciano and Costa Soares, two top-notch coaches, soon saw what they had there. Rare gem. For three seasons in a row, Fernando Gomes was the champion, among youth and among juniors. He scored hundreds of goals and came of age before the age of 18.
It still smelled like April, on September 8, 1974, when Brazilian coach Aymore Moreira gave the 17-year-old an alternative in the FC Porto first team, in the heart of the Estádio das Antas stadium. And what a debut! He scored two goals that defeated CUF (2-1). And those were just the first two of 419 “orgasms,” as he called them. And then the pawn got acquainted with the unique celebration of the debutante, with an impulse to the net and into the arms of the fans, with such a physiological and well-described act as the maximum degree of copulation with the ball.
The enactment was repeated again and again, again and again, and always with new excitement. There were 419 banderillos in 17 years of professional career. During his 13 years at Porto, he became the top scorer in the club’s history with 354 accurate shots. He played for two years (1980-82) in Spain, for Gijón, and scored 16 goals there in 33 games and between multiple injuries before returning for a second spell at Porto and making some saves. He ended his career with Sporting CP (1989–91), for which he scored 38 goals in 79 games. He still scored 11 goals in 47 caps.
With a remarkable variety of resources, above all a unique heading technique, Gomes was a six-time winner of the Bola de Prata award, which is awarded to the top scorer of the championship, he was a predator of the area, endowed with an unmistakable flair. “My mission was not to score beautiful goals, but to score,” he himself said in one of the last interviews given to JN on the day he celebrated his 60th birthday.
At that time, in the 1970s and 1980s, which preceded the advent of television, that box that also changed football, and also preceded the adoption of the super-liberal Bosman law, in those glorious days of radio, Amaro reporting and Quadrante Norte also became the star of Porto. Gomes not only scored in series but was also a very charismatic playmaker. A trendy haircut, hair blowing in the wind, in this “pop-rock” air made thousands and thousands of new players of Porto, in the rallying of the community that destroyed the Andradesh complex and made Dragao a symbol of world football.
Because all this is the heritage of a great champion – world champion, European champion, five-time national champion, three super cups, three cups, one European super cup … – and a symbol of identity that FC Porto and Portuguese football have lost. .
