/ 2 February 2007

Arsenal’s ‘Beast’ carries his burden with ease

”Sometimes I’m amazed with European clubs — they spend fortunes on ordinary players just because they’re Brazilian.”

This wry observation, from Tostao, a World Cup winner and one of today’s most-respected commentators on Brazilian football, might well apply to many talent-hungry European nations, but England is not one of them.

It is one of the curiosities of the Premiership that a league with so much money to burn has not bought into the famed Brazilian marketplace with much gusto.

Brazil is the world’s great exporter of footballers. In 2005, the last year for which figures are available, not far off 1 000 of them left for employment elsewhere. Brazilians are crucial members of every team in Spain and Italy and crop up everywhere from Russia to Malta.

Yet the English game has only recently welcomed its 20th prospect from the country that yields the most enviable supply of natural talent — and some of those made a pretty lamentable impression. Why?

The truth is it works both ways. Brazilians, given the choice, find it easier to move to less alien climes. English clubs usually find the route to a successful transfer plagued by obstacles. Arsenal, for instance, have signed five players from Brazil’s top league, the Campeonato, and only one of them — Gilberto Silva — has not had some kind of serious passport problem along the line.

Julio Clement Baptista (25) landed in England last August, one year after Arsène Wenger first made a move for a player whose brute force and killer instinct earned him the nickname ”la Bestia” of Sevilla.

Having made him the priority target in the summer of 2005, Wenger never really stood a chance as Baptista needed to stay in Spain for another year to obtain the prize all South American players welcome as a valuable bonus: a European passport.

Wenger has not just had to wait a year to see what ”the Beast” has to offer. An extra six months working on fitness and personal adaptation was also necessary after he arrived in London.

The delay has very suddenly looked like being worth it. In over 180 minutes of startling Carling Cup football at Liverpool and Tottenham, in which Baptista scored six goals, stuck one in his own net and missed a penalty, he offered a pretty compelling answer. He has physical and mental substance.

Baptista’s eyes light up as he recalls his four-goal spree at Anfield. He has the match ball at home, signed by his teammates. It is a symbol of the moment he clicked with English football.

”It was very significant,” he says. ”Frankly, I was bursting to play. People never see how much we work here, they just see what happens on the pitch, and that was the fruit of hard work.”

A naturally gentle giant, he grafted with good grace. ”It is normal for any player that arrives here in the English league that they can’t make miracles straight away,” Baptista explains.

”It is a very different league to anywhere else. It takes time to get used to the speed. There’s no time for anything. Decisions have to be faster, there is a lot more physical contact and you have to be ready to absorb the impact.”

That should not really be a problem for Baptista, who was known as ”Tanque” (Tank) in Brazil — with good reason. Was he always big for his age? ”No,” he smiles. ”As a child I was a bit tall but I was very thin.”

He holds out a finger to indicate his boyish stick legs — although his hands could now belong to a heavyweight boxer. ”It was later that I started to gain strength, by 16, 17.”

Baptista, who never knew his father, was brought up by his mother — a nurse —and grand parents. His family were influential in his footballing development, particularly his grandfather, who had been a professional goalkeeper.

He laughs at the idea the English have that his country produces a million good footballers every day.

”We have 200-million people in Brazil, so that is not a bad ratio. When we played in the streets I was maybe a bit better than the other boys, but once I got to the Sao Paulo club — by the age of 14, 15, 16 — there were players who were much better than me.”

Among those who graduated from his youth team and completed the journey all the way to the top is AC Milan’s playmaker Kaka and Palermo’s midfielder Simplicio.

Baptista thrived at Sao Paulo and then Sevilla, where he caught the eye with a remarkable record of 50 goals in two seasons, having been converted by the coaching staff in Spain to an attacking midfielder.

Having made a few mistakes with the number nine shirt since selling a precocious Nicolas Anelka to Real Madrid (Davor Suker, Francis Jeffers and Reyes came and went without much joy), Arsenal might just have found their ox in the box. — Â