Cheese is the secret to Silva's success
By Paul Thomson
When Gilberto Silva scores his first goal, or even makes his first mistake, at Highbury don't be surprised if Arsenal's new Brazilian midfielder starts talking about cheese at the post-match press conference.
For to Silva, cheese is a metaphor for life. He knows that 'having cheese makes you happy'. He believes that 'movement in a new direction helps you find new cheese'. And he makes sure he 'smells the cheese so he knows its getting old'.
Silva has declared that his favourite book is Who Moved My Cheese? a guide to self-improvement by US self-help guru Spencer Johnson.
It is sub-titled 'An amazing way to deal with change in your work and life' and is full of the sort of homely wisdom that Forrest Gump would have appreciated.
During the World Cup, while Silva's team-mates were larking around, singing samba songs and playing games in the squad hotel, he preferred to stay in his room reading the cheese manual for success in life.
'When you see that you can find and enjoy new cheese you change course,' he will have thought when he was asked to replace Emerson, Brazil's captain, who injured himself during one of the warm-up sessions.
'The more important your cheese is to you the more you want to hold on to it,' he will have mused as he grew in stature during the tournament.
By the time Brazil won the World Cup, Silva was one of the pillars of the side and no one could even remember who Emerson was. It is possible to divide Brazilian players roughly into two personality types.
There are the extroverts, like Ronaldo, Ronaldinho and Denilson, who love to parade in expensive clothes, drive fast cars and appear in gossip columns. And there are the shy, modest men like Silva.
Like almost all Brazilian footballers Silva was born into poverty. He is from Lagoa da Prata, a small town 100 miles west of Belo Horizonte, where his father was a metalworker and his mother a housewife.
While some players thrive on being cocky and precociously talented, others rely on abstinence, religiosity and self-discipline to work their way out of difficulties.
With public health and state education leaving a lot to be desired, many Brazilians rely on self-help books to learn about the world. The books have a disproportionately large share of the Brazilian market.
Silva was particularly struck by Johnson, the phenomenally successful American author who has sold more than 11 million copies in 26 languages.
Who Moved My Cheese? is about what happens in a maze when four different characters search for 'Cheese' - a metaphor for everything one wants out of life such as career, relationship, money, house or spiritual peace.
Silva's own journey started in the junior ranks of America MG, the third largest team in the state of Minas Gerais - away from the centres of footballing power in Rio de Janiero and Sao Paulo.
As the only male child in the family when his father retired, he was expected to earn a wage to feed them. So he gave up football at the age of 17 to go to work in a sweet factory, where he earned barely more than the minimum wage - about £50 a month at today's rates.
It was his friends who persuaded him to give football another go. He went back to America MG and, aged 20, finally won a place in the first team as a defender.
But even though he was rated one of the team's best players in 1999, helping them win the national second division, he was infuriatingly inconsistent. Atletico, the second biggest team in Belo Horizonte, bought him at the start of 2000, but he struggled to make much of an impression after fracturing his right tibia.
At Atletico, coach Carlos Alberto Parreira, who was in charge of Brazil at the 1994 World Cup, started to play Silva as a 'volante' - the word Brazilians use for defensive midfielders.
It worked. The player blossomed and became one of the stars of the team that reached the semi-final of the 2001 Brazilian championship. Off the pitch he was equally impressive: quietly spoken with a reputation of never arguing with the coach.
But it was the injury to Emerson on the eve of the World Cup that gave him his chance to make a mark on the world stage. By the end of the tournament, he was one of Brazil's key players. and had top managers queuing up to try to buy him.
Described by the Brazilian press after the World Cup as the 'Invisible Wall', Silva was the player who, in the words of new magazine Veja, 'carried the piano for Ronaldo and Rivaldo to play their tunes on'.
Or, to mix a metaphor, he had become Brazil's midfield big cheese.
