“I always wanted to be like Ronaldinho. The things he did, the way he enjoyed every minute on the pitch… I was transfixed. I felt he gave everyone a promise when he played: give me the ball and I’ll make you smile.”
Let’s face it, that could be any one of us waxing lyrical about Ronaldinho.
If you watched football in the mid-noughties, or if you’ve been anywhere near YouTube in the years since, the buck-toothed Brazilian and the miracles he performed in a Barcelona shirt have burst into your life like a ray of sunshine through menacing clouds.
But those words are not just from anyone. They are from a piece for the Players’ Tribune by Raphinha, who is three things to Ronaldinho: first, a fan; second, a family friend; and now, finally, the man to transport his irreverent spirit right back onto that Camp Nou pitch.
Raphinha is going to Barca, and if you ask us, he couldn’t possibly be a better fit.
Why? Well he has it, that same thing that he saw in Ronaldinho: give him the ball and he’ll make you smile.
He’ll make you smile and make defenders cry. Just ask Gary Cahill.
It was February 2021 and Raphinha was slap bang in the middle of his first season in England, a first season spent confusing the living shit out of any defender ill-advised enough to go within three metres of him.
The Brazilian got the ball out wide and looked like he was cornered. Cahill probably thought, ‘I’ve got this under control.’
He very much didn’t have it under control.
This Raphinha is mad pic.twitter.com/I2A42csQP5
— – (@khalzb) February 8, 2021
Raphinha reached up and plucked a piece of skill right from footballing heaven, pulling off a sort of swivelling, spinning, backheel-Cruyff-turn that gets us so excited we can barely even type these words.
If you look closely, you can actually see Gary Cahill deflate as he realises what’s happened and pull the Brazilian to the floor.
The Cahill destruction came just a few weeks after another moment of Raphinha brutality.
Against Brighton, he had almost put Joel Veltman into early retirement with a trick of the mind so confounding it could wipe the smug grin off Derren Brown’s face.
Just look at it. Pure jus de football genius.
That form at Leeds quickly brought him full international recognition. Was he intimidated? Was he cowed by the pressure of playing for Brazil? Was he heck.
He quickly became the darling of the nation, lighting up a Selecao side that many thought had become too dull with his…
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