Fabio Aurelio was smiling – and not just because after the grey slog of a Mersey winter, last week’s weather felt a bit more Brazilian. Thursday was a particularly good day at training. The sun shone and the session began with Rafael Benitez making a speech. After months of will-he-won’t-he, Benitez had agreed to an extension of his contract. He gathered his squad “and said thank you to everyone because at the end of the day he knows what players do on the pitch makes the difference between whether a coach will stay or leave. It’s good for him, good for the club, good for us,” Aurelio said.
“He’s shown he’s getting better [in England] every season and this is a good moment to give him the opportunity to even get bigger. He lives for football and that’s what makes the difference between him and other coaches.”
Aurelio knows Liverpool’s manager better than most, having spent three seasons with him at Valencia and then having been at Anfield since 2006. Both are keen to extend their association. Like Dirk Kuyt, Alvaro Arbeloa and Daniel Agger, Aurelio is a free agent next summer. With his own future settled, Benitez wants to tie up new deals for all four as quickly as possible. “If the club and the boss are happy with my work, for sure I’ll be happy to continue, so it should not be complicated,” Aurelio said.
“I had one talk with the boss at the beginning of the season but he was telling us he would like us to wait until he decided his situation before talking to the players who were finishing contracts. Now he’s staying, it should be easier. But, honestly, I haven’t been thinking about it. I’m very happy in the moment I am in now.”
No wonder. The Brazilian is enjoying the sort of prolonged good health and form for which he has yearned since 2003. Then, having helped Valencia to the first of Benitez’s two Spanish league titles in 2001-02 and scored a remarkable 10 goals while playing largely at left-back, the following season, a knee injury put him out of football for 18 months.
Knocks continued to afflict him but at last looks the player Benitez promised when he signed. “He can cross the ball superbly and he is maybe a better passer of the ball than Xabi Alonso,” said the manager three summers ago. “People will say, ‘Oh really?’ But you will see the quality of his left foot. At set-pieces he is fantastic.”
Edwin van der Sar discovered this last Saturday. Aurelio was one of the main protagonists in Liverpool’s destruction of Manchester United, quelling Cristiano Ronaldo with his canny and nimble defending before scoring with a free kick placed so expertly that Van der Sar did not even dive to try to stop it. Aurelio describes himself as “quite quiet, I don’t talk a lot on the pitch”, but celebrated his strike without inhibition. “Oh yeah,” he blushed. “I was excited. We knew that goal [making it 3-1] killed the game off in our favour. The moment you strike a free kick you know whether you’ve hit it well or not and when you see the keeper doesn’t even move and it’s going in the net, you feel even better.”
He is not the first Brazilian with dead-ball skills [“I think you have to have more or less a good touch” he said by way of explaining this national trait] but his were honed in a quirky milieu. His mentor was Rogerio Ceni, goalkeeper for Aurelio’s first club, Sao Paolo, who not only takes free kicks but has scored almost 50 of them in his career.
“He’s the world record holder for goals as a keeper [with 83] and he kicks really well,” said Aurelio. “As a kid I took free kicks but I didn’t practise. Then, when I was 17 and joined the first team of Sao Paolo, I saw that every day Ceni was practising free kicks and I joined him. I kept it going at Valencia and now here. If you practise 30 free kicks three times a week, the percentage you score in games will be higher.”
Of players who have scored more than once directly from free kicks in this season’s Premier League, Aurelio’s conversion rate is the highest. “I’d like to score more goals for Liverpool and I hope now I’ll have more opportunities to take free kicks. Maybe next time [Steven] Gerrard will be more likely to give me a chance,” he said, laughing, his indignation lighthearted.
Aurelio dreams of claiming what once belonged to another free kick specialist, Roberto Carlos: Brazil’s left-back slot. Aurelio played 42 times for his country at youth and Olympic levels but suffered his serious knee injury days after a first call-up to the full Brazil squad. He was close to being selected again in 2006-07 but damaged his achilles. Now he is receiving hints that he is again being considered for the Selecao.
“They say left-back is not a position which is closed and there’s a Confederations Cup at the end of the season so it would be a good time to get involved. It’s a big frustration I got injured before and I’d like to have at least one chance. I think I could take my opportunity.” The quiet man has quiet belief.
“I’m not as strong as he was physically but, technically, I could be better,” said Aurelio when comparing himself to Carlos. His conviction extends to his team. Valencia’s 2001-02 title was secured after the team came from a long way back to overtake Real Madrid and Aurelio feels Liverpool are capable of doing a similar job against United, who slipped up again with a 2-0 defeat at Fulham yesterday.
“It’s more difficult because United have not been conceding a lot of points like Madrid did that season but if we win all our games we’ll have a chance of them making some mistakes and of winning the league,” he said. “We have had many games when we were losing and got a result, but because we had a good week last week, we’re not the best team in the world. If we lose against Villa, everyone forgets about beating United.”
A sad anniversary has just passed. In 2000 Aurelio’s father, Mario, was killed in a car crash. “It happened on March 8. I miss him for sure. I had just got married, in January 2000, and he died two days before his birthday. That summer I went to the Olympics and then moved to Spain. So everything you do you start to think, ‘If my dad had been there to see that . . . ’,” he said.
Aurelio’s father worked in a plastics factory in Sao Carlos, the small industrial city in Sao Paolo state where Fabio grew up, and abandoned a promising football career to provide for Aurelio, his mother, Neide, and his sister – who is married to the Real Betis midfielder Edu.
“My family had food. Most people where I’m from don’t have food. But we weren’t in a good situation. Football brings me a much better condition for me and my family,” Aurelio said. “When I signed my first contract with Sao Paolo at 17 I got my first car and at the same time I gave a car to my father. He’d never had a car. I helped buy my parents a house. But these were just small things. Never can we pay back what our parents do for us.”
His family is his world. Settled in the village suburb of Woolton in south Liverpool, his great pleasures are his wife Elaine’s cooking, and taking his son, Fabio, and daughter, Victoria, to the cinema. “The last films we saw were Hotel for Dogs and Bolt. That was in 3D and the kids loved it,” he said.
“Valencia’s similar to Brazil . . . the weather, the food . . . and everyone I told about moving to Liverpool said, ‘You’re crazy’. I didn’t expect to feel so comfortable here.
“The problem is my kids know more about English. They say, ‘Daddy, read for me’. I start and they correct. ‘Don’t pronounce it like that ’.”
Aurelio’s English, for the record, is actually very good. And his left foot, just as Benitez promised long ago, is starting to prove most articulate too.
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