Adryan ⭑ From A-Z since '92
Massimo Cellino arrived in a blaze of guitar solos and late nights, with Adryan as the most promising of his sidekicks, and if his ownership of Leeds wasn't going to be healthy the least it could have been was fun.
Adryan Oliveira Tavares was Massimo Cellino's perfect player, the Cellino era at Leeds in a nutshell, a hint of how much fun those years could have been overwhelmed by the self-defeating reality of what they were.
There's something a little Fagin about Cellino's part in the story, and about Adryan there's something that's Oliver Twist. Tipped as a child star in Brazil, by the time Cellino went to Rio de Janeiro to buy a goalkeeper Adryan was turning out not to be the player who would single handedly bring glory back to Flamengo and not, as they'd nicknamed him, 'herdeiro de Zico', 'the heir of Zico'. Forgetting about goalies, Cellino offered a way out from under the pressure that was stifling his talents by joining his gang in Cagliari, and both club and player happily accepted a long term loan. But if being the obsessive object of passionate Flamengo fans was too much for Adryan, he wasn't helped by swapping that for becoming the singular obsession of Massimo Cellino.
Cellino had lost interest in Cagliari and bought Leeds United by the time Adryan was fit enough to make any impact in Italy, but he hadn't lost interest in the new Zico. The public pursuit of Adryan's transfer to Leeds started before Dave Hockaday was appointed as manager and didn't conclude until after he was sacked, by which point Adryan had confusedly tweeted that, 'I don't know my future yet either, today I am a Cagliari footballer, I wake up every morning to do my best' and, nine days later, 'Thanks Cagliari, I learned a lot with u, but that's football. Sono anche un tifoso. (I'll always be a fan) | Now I'm Leeds'.
And, as at Flamengo, he was now responsible for carrying the hopes of a disillusioned fanbase at a massive club fallen on hard times. If anything he was less prepared than he had been in Rio, because he wasn't expecting the same intensity. "Younger players in Brazil, they have big pressure on them," he said. "At Flamengo, I was playing for a team with eighty million fans in Brazil. That's a little bit difficult ... So maybe it's easier somewhere else." Maybe, but that somewhere else was probably Cagliari. Now Cellino had dragged him to Elland Road, home of the fans Victor Orta would later compare to Latin teams for their vociferous intensity, and the chaotic focus of Cellino's post-hangover psychodramas.