Juan Brandariz ‘Chumi’, former La Masia player, will return to Barcelona this Saturday (9pm) with the hope of facing the club where he grew up.
The 23-year-old centre-back, now in the UD Almeria, pointed out that he ” will always be grateful to Barça” because for six years he spent at the club. All in all, his aspiration is to leave the Camp Nou winning some points. Chumi was part of the team that won Barça’s last UYL trophy.
Chumi made his debut with the first Barça team on the occasion of a Copa del Rey tie against Cultural Leonesa. “Anything can always happen in a game and we want to get something out of it,” he said. The formula to achieve this goal is “to be defensively good for 90 minutes, even if there are times when we have to suffer.”
From his time as a culé Chumi recalled that “with Araujo I coincided with Barça B and I also trained with Pique and Busquets. After participating in six games this season with Almería, the defender stressed that “I always train to be ready to play” although he admitted that Barça, ” has many offensive variants”, “as a defender they are going to make you suffer from forwards like Lewandowski”, currently the league’s top scorer with 13 goals.
In 2019, Chumi was an involuntary protagonist due to an improper alignment in the first leg of the round of 16 of that Cup against Levante.
