Roque Junior at Leeds: savaged by Big Dunc and all at sea in the Premier League – The Athletic 19/2/20

By Jack Lang and Phil Hay

A little patch of shoulder is visible in the gap between the slackened yellow fabric and his vest. From the back of his head, a stray thread dangles, almost melancholically. His collar hangs on for dear life, trying to maintain a semblance of normality, but the game is up.

The visual metaphor is simply too perfect to ignore. It will define him and damn him, much like the nickname that is already being brewed in the minds of the travelling Leeds United fans.

Fifteen minutes into his first encounter with Duncan Ferguson, Roque Junior looks completely shell-shocked. His shirt has been torn to shreds. Four weeks and four matches into his ill-fated dalliance with English football, his reputation has gone much the same way.

He is a World Cup winner. He arrived at Leeds fresh from AC Milan’s 2003 Champions League triumph. He is 27 years old, so theoretically at the peak of his powers. Yet here he is, disrobed and disconsolate (pictured above) at Goodison Park, grimacing through his own personal hell.

What he doesn’t know at this stage is that things are not going to get any better.

It was a busy summer for Kevin Blackwell. As Peter Reid’s assistant manager, he welcomed eight new signings to Elland Road in the lead-up to the 2003-04 campaign. While a few of those names came from left field, Roque Junior’s preceded him.

“He was a Brazil player,” Blackwell tells The Athletic. “The transfer came out of the blue, but there was no doubting his quality.”

Initially, however, the Department of Employment did not fully agree with that assessment.

Roque Junior was denied a work permit, meaning Reid had to argue Leeds’ case in front of a three-man panel in Sheffield before the transfer window closed. By the time the deal went through — a season-long loan, with Milan contributing towards his £40,000-a-week wage — the defender had flown to South America to play two World Cup qualifiers.

He returned to a defensive injury crisis. Dominic Matteo and Michael Duberry were both sidelined. Lucas Radebe was struggling with a knee complaint and not fit enough to start. Leeds were due to play Leicester City on a Monday night; Roque Junior barely had time to introduce himself to his new team-mates before he was named in the starting line-up.

“I met him at the training ground when he arrived,” recalls Blackwell. “It was about four o’clock in the afternoon. He’d literally just got off the flight. I took him for a little warm-up and a stretching session, and then we travelled down to the hotel for the Leicester game.

“We were struggling at centre-half, so Roque just had to play. He was thrown in at the deep end, with no opportunity to find his bearings. He didn’t even know the players he was up against — their strengths, their weaknesses.

“It was just one of those things. But you thought, ‘If anyone’s got the ability to do it, it’ll be a Brazil international.'”

That cachet counted for little, however, and from the first whistle, he found it difficult to contain a lively Marcus Bent. He was booked for pulling the striker back in the opening exchanges, then soundly beaten in the air in the run-up to Leicester’s second goal. The home side ran out 4-0 winners and while Roque Junior was not to blame for any of the other goals — he was subbed off before they went in — it counted as a chastening introduction to life in the Premier League.

“A baptism of fire,” Reid called it at the time. Blackwell concurs: “It was a physical battle — one of those ‘Welcome to English football’ moments.”

The problem was that those moments kept coming, week after week. Against Birmingham City, he gave away a penalty and was sent off for two bookable offences. After serving his suspension, he was back in the team for the League Cup game against third-tier Swindon Town. Leeds snuck through on penalties after goalkeeper Paul Robinson’s famous last-gasp equaliser but not before Roque Junior had been given a chasing by Sam Parkin and Jon Stevenson.

Parkin, understandably, has not forgotten the day he faced a World Cup winner. Nor was he particularly impressed by Roque Junior’s performance in that match.

“Jon and I both ran at him in in the first half and caused him problems,” Parkin tells The Athletic. “Jon pulled Roque Junior out of the centre quite a lot and he got frustrated. I think that he was surprised at our quality.

“I remember him struggling in the air and when balls got played into me, he was trying to nick the ball in front of me rather than get involved in a physical battle. I also remember him kicking out at me a little when I shepherded the ball from him late in the second half.

“He was clearly very comfortable with the ball at his feet but I felt that I had the upper hand physically.”

Which brings us back to Ferguson and his one-man rearrangement of Roque Junior’s wardrobe. Again, Leeds lost 4-0. Again, the Brazilian was bullied.

“He had the shirt ripped off his back,” says Blackwell. “I remember coming in at half-time and seeing it. Duncan would beat anybody up in the 18-yard box. There was no disgrace in that but it put doubts in people’s minds — ‘Can this guy handle the demands of the Premier League?’ I think clubs tried to target Roque on the physical side after that.”

Speak to anyone who was at Leeds at that time and two things quickly become apparent. The first is that Roque Junior was a thoroughly decent character off the pitch: friendly and serious about his work. The second is that there were mitigating circumstances which should be factored into any assessment of his time at Elland Road.

“He was a nice guy, a genuinely nice guy,” one former team-mate tells The Athletic. “Some of the guys who came into that dressing room were poison. They contributed nothing and caused trouble but he wasn’t like that.

“It must have been strange for him. You’re in a country where you don’t look suited to the game and you’re not playing well. You shouldn’t pretend that we were a good Leeds team, either. Quite the opposite. He was probably asking himself what he was doing here.”

Blackwell, who arrived at Leeds with Reid in March 2003, describes a club in flux. Debts were starting to pinch. Holes in the squad were filled by a string of high-risk loan signings. The excitement of that extraordinary run to the Champions League semi-finals just two years earlier had already curdled into an oppressive toxicity. They would end up relegated that season after finishing joint bottom, beginning an exile from the top flight that continues to this day.

“It was a tough time,” Blackwell says. “Personally, I could not believe how bad Leeds were when I first went there. The club was in such turmoil behind the scenes. I remember meeting up with a member of staff, six weeks after we arrived, and we knew it was the wrong place to be — so what do you think the players were thinking? Especially the lads who had just turned up.

“I found Roque to be a really nice fella. There was no arrogance about him. He came to the right club at the wrong time. He was just given no time to acclimatise — either to English football or to Leeds United. It was sad, really. We never saw the best of him.”

Contrary to popular belief, there was a player in there.

Palmeiras fans will wax lyrical about the classy, unflappable centre-back who helped them to a spate of trophies in the late 1990s. He won the Copa Libertadores under Luiz Felipe Scolari, whose trust in him both at club level, and later for the national team, was unwavering: it was telling that Roque Junior remained a fixture of the Brazil side throughout his ordeal in Yorkshire.

To some degree, Roque Junior was a victim of simple category error. People looked at him, clocked his towering frame, and assumed he was a dominant bruiser. In reality, he was far more comfortable with the ball at his feet than he was bouncing off strikers. He could pick a pass and was prepared to dribble past a man.

That constructive skill set was visible on the training ground, even if it did not get much of an airing on match days. “He glided across the pitch,” says Blackwell. “He had a good touch, maybe he took a few risks that he shouldn’t have done, but he had all the technical ability. He had pace, could play out from the back. Roque would have been made for today’s game.”

That view is shared by Roque Junior himself.

“Today, English football is a bit different to how it was at that time,” he tells The Athletic. “You had four or five sides who played football, trying to control the match, and the rest of the teams were more about long clearances, fighting for the second ball.

“It was a more physical, quicker style of football, with more long balls. Today, even the smaller teams try to keep the ball on the floor, to play from back to front. I remember asking for the ball from the goalkeeper and him telling me to push out. It was different to what I was used to.”

None of which is to claim that he was anything other than a spectacular let-down in a Leeds shirt. It was not just that he got outmuscled by a series of forwards — he also spent long stretches of matches looking utterly discombobulated. His positioning was deeply suspect. At times, he played like his head and feet were in different time zones.

“The Premier League wasn’t for him,” says the former team-mate. “Some of his defending was terrible.”

Even the respite provided by his two goals against Manchester United, in his fifth game, a 3-2 extra-time loss in the League Cup, proved to be short-lived. Four days later, Arsenal cruised to a 4-1 win at Elland Road. Roque Junior was caught out for two of their goals.

Then, at Fratton Park, came the nadir. The Brazilian started in central midfield alongside Jody Morris. He had played midfield on occasion back in Brazil but you would not have known it: he was bypassed, irrelevant, a ghost in the No 12 jersey as Portsmouth scored six.

Reid was sacked after that game, and Roque Junior never played for Leeds again.

He did not even make the bench in the nine league games that followed, which is hardly a surprise when you hear the damning assessment of Eddie Gray, who replaced Reid as interim manager after the Portsmouth match.

“I couldn’t see it in him,” Gray, who starred as a winger for the great Leeds sides of the 1960s and 1970s, tells The Athletic. “I’m not saying he couldn’t play, because he was a World Cup winner; he must have had plenty of talent. But when I watched him train, I never saw it. The positioning, the defending… none of it was good enough.

“There were no problems with his character, but when you’re in relegation trouble you try to pick the players you think will get you out of it. I didn’t feel like he was going to do that, so I didn’t play him. But it was strange, to have a World Cup winner who you didn’t think was good enough. You’d think he’d be first in the team.”

The curtain fell on the Roque Horror Show on January 22, when his contract was terminated by mutual consent.

Take a glance at the raw numbers of his stay – seven games, six defeats, one red card, 24 goals and a penalty conceded – and it is hard not to view it a humanitarian act. Someone had to put the poor man out of his misery.

Roque Junior himself does not labour under any illusions when he looks back at that time. “It could have been better,” he admits, succinctly.

There is still palpable frustration though, even all these years later. “I could have done with a bit more time to adapt,” he says. “And the context was hard. I had played against Leeds [for Milan] in 2000, when the team was stronger but when I joined, they were in a difficult situation. You also need time to adapt from one league to another, from a title-chasing team to one fighting against relegation. It was different.”

Yet it would be wrong to paint Roque Junior as resentful. He has always maintained he does not regret joining Leeds and while it would be easy to chalk that up as brave-face-in-public spin, Blackwell tells a story that instantly debunks the theory.

“A year after I left the club, I went to Barbados with my wife,” Blackwell recalls. “Roque just happened to be on the same beach. He came over and we had a long chat about his time at Leeds. He talked about his frustration. He was quite philosophical about it and never showed any animosity towards Leeds. He was a very dignified man. He could have been quite vitriolic but he wasn’t.”

That chimes with Roque Junior’s own admirably sanguine appraisal of those five gruelling months. “I always say that it was good to get to know another country, another culture — and to understand English football,” he concludes.

“I enjoyed it as a learning experience.”