Lucas Leyva: a thirty-year-old opornik, which personified Liverpool

Brazilian young players are very much appreciated all over the world, but not in England. For a long time few of the Latin American players wanted to go to play in the Premier League. And there are not many clubs that would like to see in their roster a technical, but physically weak Brazilian. However, in recent years this trend has begun to change. Clubs of the English Premier League began to pay attention to the Argentines and Brazilians, Chileans, Colombians and Uruguayans.

Carier start

Lucas Leiva has long been considered a young and promising player who could become a real world-class star. In 2007, he moved to English Liverpool. It would seem that a suitable club, a team in which you can well prove yourself. After the victory in the Champions League in 2005, "Liverpool" stopped demonstrating something interesting, the team could not win almost no trophies.

Reliability in the central zone of Liverpool should have been added just Lucas Leiva. Biography of the player at the time of the transition to the Merseyside was not rich. He played 38 official matches for the main "Gremio" team. For the Brazilians, he performed from 2005 to 2007. In 2006, he was able to win the Brazilian Championship with his team. And in 2007 he played his first match in the national team.

"Liverpool"

The transition to Liverpool did not become unexpected. In his first season at Anfield, the Brazilian played 18 matches. Perhaps, Leiva would not have played as many matches, had it not been for Sissoko's departure. With each season, Leiva progressed. In the season of 2010-2011 he was able to become the best player of the team. But then there was a decline in his football career. Injuries, unsuccessful performances of the team, are incomprehensible to the management of the club - so it is possible to characterize everything that happened around Lucas following years. In 2015, Lucas Leiva was able to recover from injury.

Leyva played more than two hundred matches for Liverpool, but he is not a star and leader of the team. Return after a serious injury in 2015 remained invisible, however, like the whole career of the Brazilian. In the foreground there were no one to understand the permutations of Rogers, the strange behavior of Balotelli.

Competition for a place

Still give the player due credit. When he came to the team, then his position was a lot of players. Even despite the sale of Momo Sissoko, Lukas had enough competitors. But Lucas Leiva is a football player who was not afraid of difficulties.

Having joined the English grandee, Leyva was a 20-year-old specialist in the selection of the ball. He did not have physical data, skill, but he was still in his own way brilliant. Even in spite of the almost complete lack of speed and impact, he was for a long time a key player in the central zone, an unsung hero of his own. In this regard, it can be compared to the former Nigerian defensive midfielder of the London "Chelsea", whose name is John Obi Mikel.

Lucas's first rivals in Liverpool were Mascherano and Alonso. After their departure, "Barcelona" and "Real", respectively, there were new competitors: Henderson and Allen. However, none of the listed players did not believe that their rival is Lucas Leiva. "Liverpool" is such a team, in which the rotation takes place all the time, not always understandable and necessary, but it is there. So it turned out that, being a player "on the hook," Leyva spent more time on the field than the players of the main line-up.

Desire to stay in Liverpool

Whatever it was, Lucas Leiva remained in the team. Players changed, coaches changed, but the Brazilian managed to prove his professional suitability all the time, and he remained a player of the "reds".

In 2015, almost every training session of the then Liverpool coach Brendan Rogers was asked about the possible sale or lease of a football player, but the coach always replied that he needed a Brazilian and did not plan to sell or lease it. In the same year, 2015, Lucas was hunted down by Inter Milan and Madrid, which is gaining momentum, Atlético. Also, the interest in the Brazilian was attributed to Napoli, which was coached by the former Liverpool coach Rafael Benitez, under which Lucas Leiva appeared as a member of the British.

Lucas will always remain a secondary player. As the former assistant to the head coach of Dynamo Kiev Raul Riachcho said: "I like the role of the second plan. The head coach is my father, and I'm more of a mother. " That's Lucas. It is more comfortable for him to be a second-tier player and not play the first violin in the team. Yes, and the salary that he receives at the club, is able to force many to close their eyes to those moments that they may not like.