Adriano: the man who didn’t realise how good he was, reaches his brief peak | OneFootball

Naturally, like most geniuses, Adriano scoffed at the sensible option, took a Roberto Carlos-length run-up and channelled the force of ten men through his left foot. De Sanctis barely had time to complete his dive, never mind save the thing. He hopped up afterwards with a half-smile of acceptance, very quickly realising that two Buffons probably wouldn’t have smelled that one.

Four minutes later Inter were defending a corner, Adriano nominally helping out, but really just sort of loitering on the edge the area in that way strikers tend to when they want to make it look like they’re helping out. Juan Sebastian Veron half-hooked the ball clear, which technically counted as the assist. Adriano picked the ball up about 25 yards from his own goal with three defenders in front of him, but they immediately knew there were problems, panicking like the farmer in ‘Withnail and I’ when they leave the gate to the bull’s field open.

If Twitter was around in 2004, left wing-back Felipe would have suffered the indignity of being turned into a meme: backpedalling, he somewhat naively tried to keep up with the pace of Adriano’s movement, but in an attempt to change direction at the same pace as his opponent, his legs made the unilateral decision to give in, and sent him to the turf, face first. The only saving grace was that it happened in the centre circle, so nobody could really dwell on his humiliation, lest they miss what was about to happen.

Emilson Cribari was next up to try the impossible, but his feet were unwilling/unable to move at the required speed, eventually stumbling and looking that bit in a cartoon where the character starts to sprint on a bit of carpet, their legs just windmill in the air and the carpet bunches up behind them.

Their efforts were admirable, but pointless. Adriano slammed the finish into the corner, and jogged off in celebration. Cribari loosely looked around for someone to blame, before eventually realising that, as the Daily Telegraph’s Paul Hayward said about Leo Messi recently, you can’t insure against acts of God. “I did not realise at the beginning…how good I was,” he said a few years ago.

It’s probably unrealistic to think Adriano could have continued like that for the rest of his career. Even without the grief, the problems with alcohol and the psychological issues that the grief would exacerbate, that sort of brilliance only lasts once in a generation. Obviously, we wanted more, but perhaps it’s enough that we got any of it at all.

“A lot of people – me included – look back on his career as ‘what could’ve been?’” said James Richardson, about Adriano’s brilliance at the Copa America. “But that summer, and the subsequent year at Inter, it really was.”

This piece first appeared on the Totally Football Show in July 2019.

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