Juninho’s second season, Alex Ferguson described him as the Premier League’s best player and later considered signing him. His finest moment in English football arrived during that campaign, a 1–0 home victory over Chelsea in March. He outshone Zola and created a succession of chances, wasted by Craig Hignett and Mikkel Beck. Eventually, he settled things himself. Receiving the ball wide on the left, he slalomed between Wise and Di Matteo and evaded a desperate lunge from Chelsea’s third central midfielder, Craig Burley, before slipping the ball into the left-hand channel for Beck. The Danish striker paused, and then chipped the ball into the box for a perfect diving header from – of all people – five-foot-six Juninho. The Brazilian magician wasn’t simply performing the duties expected of a Brazilian number 10, outwitting the entire opposition midfield, but also the duties of an English number 9, beating Chelsea’s centre-backs to score a header. ‘I don’t know what Juninho’s running on at the moment,’ Robson said afterwards. ‘He isn’t looking tired, he’s keeping pace with the game – and he’s tackling back!’ Make that the qualities of an English number 4, too.
In his second season Juninho was handed Middlesbrough’s number 10 shirt, having worn 25 in his debut campaign, and was also named the Premier League’s Player of the Season. Admittedly not as prestigious an award as the PFA or FWA Player of the Year, it was nevertheless an acknowledgement of his great influence. And yet, staggeringly for one of the league’s most revered players, Juninho ended the campaign sobbing on the pitch as Middlesbrough were relegated.
Basing the side around Juninho didn’t pay dividends. When Juninho made his debut for Middlesbrough in November 1995, the Teesiders were sixth, having lost to only the two title challengers, Manchester United and Newcastle. Despite Juninho’s impact, their form nosedived dramatically. They were atrocious in the second half of the season, winning just two of 19 matches. They finished 12th, but in points terms, were closer to relegation than 11th.
The 1996/97 relegation campaign was also strange for Middlesbrough. They reached both the League Cup and FA Cup finals, losing to Leicester City and Chelsea respectively – a devastating double blow for a club that had never won a major honour (although Juninho would later help them to League Cup success seven years later, then into his third spell on Teeside – he simply couldn’t stay away). Granted, Middlesbrough’s relegation was partly because they were deducted three points for withdrawing from a December fixture at Blackburn when half their squad had been wiped out by flu, but you can’t ignore the fact that they had the division’s worst defensive record. There were also major problems in the dressing room, particularly involving star striker Fabrizio Ravanelli, a divisive influence. He once interrupted a team meeting with a lengthy rant in Italian about wanting to leave, and had a fight with Neil Cox before the FA Cup Final after the right-back suggested Ravanelli wasn’t fit enough to start. ‘Half the squad hated him and the other half loved him,’ said Hignett. ‘He was one of the best finishers I’ve seen, but he rubbed people up the wrong way. He was selfish in everything he did.’
Meanwhile Juninho, while individually brilliant and very popular with teammates, caused Middlesbrough problems. Like Cantona, Bergkamp and Zola, he thrived in space between the lines, but was a different type of footballer. An advanced midfielder rather than a withdrawn forward, he ventured into deeper positions to collect possession. He therefore wasn’t suited to a deep-lying forward role in a 4–4–1–1 like the aforementioned players, and Robson constantly changed his shape in an attempt to base the side around both Juninho and Barmby, deploying 4–3–2–1 or 3–4–2–1 in his first season. It didn’t quite work defensively, and getting the best from two players between the lines was difficult. Both Juninho and Barmby had a better relationship with the underrated Hignett, and Barmby departed after 18 months for Everton, leaving Juninho as the sole creator. His form improved, and a 6–1 thrashing of Derby demonstrated Middlesbrough’s potential. ‘I am now playing as well as I ever did in Brazil, but I think that is because I have found my best position,’ Juninho said. In other words, the system was based around him.
In that second season Juninho suffered from fatigue, not helped by Middlesbrough’s double cup run – or by international trips to South America, then an unprecedented problem for Premier League clubs. His biggest problem, though, was man-marking – Middlesbrough didn’t have a Plan B when Juninho was nullified. The most famous example came during the 1997 League Cup Final defeat to Leicester. Two weeks beforehand in the league, Juninho had torn apart the Foxes in a 3–1 victory, so for the trip to Wembley, Leicester boss Martin O’Neill deployed Pontus Kåmark to follow the Brazilian everywhere across the pitch. In a 2011 interview discussing nearly 25 years in management, O’Neill said he’d never sent his teams out to be anything other than positive – apart from that final, when he knew he needed to concentrate on stopping Juninho. ‘If you had seen him a fortnight before running riot at Filbert Street, only a fool would have chosen not to man-mark him,’ he said. Many other managers thought the same; stop Juninho, and you stopped Middlesbrough. Ultimately, it ended with their relegation.
This became a familiar pattern among bottom-half clubs – brilliant individuals who weren’t necessarily conducive to Premier League success. Bolton spent a club record £1.5m on Yugoslav playmaker Saša Ćurčić, who scored one of the goals of 1995/96 against Chelsea, ghosting past five challenges and playing a one-two with Alan Thompson before firing home. Bolton finished bottom that season. ‘I was a crowd pleaser, everywhere the fans loved me,’ Ćurčić recalled. ‘But I wasn’t very good for the team because I wasn’t a team player.’
Another inventive playmaker who scored a memorable solo goal that season was Manchester City’s Georgi Kinkladze – the epitome of a frustrating genius – who demonstrated the dangers of building your side around a number 10. Like Juninho, Kinkladze was recruited after a sensational performance against British opposition, at a time when Premier League scouts rarely looked abroad for new players. Kinkladze was inspirational in Georgia’s 5–0 thrashing of Wales in November 1994, a seismic result; just three years after Georgia had gained independence, it was their first-ever competitive victory. Deployed behind Temuri Ketsbaia and Shota Arveladze in a 4–3–1–2, Kinkladze ran the game and grabbed his first international goal. ‘They murdered us,’ Wales goalkeeper Neville Southall later recalled. ‘Kinkladze was different class and the best player on the pitch by a mile.’ In the return fixture the following summer – four days before Juninho’s performance at Wembley captured Middlesbrough’s attention – Kinkladze again dominated. This time he scored the game’s only goal, an incredible 25-yard, left-footed chip over Southall.
The Georgian was tracked by other clubs, and had unsuccessful trials at both Real and Atlético Madrid – and, intriguingly, a month-long loan at Boca Juniors, who revere the number 10 role more than any club in world football, where Kinakladze met his idol Maradona. None of them signed Kinkladze permanently, however, and instead he joined Manchester City as Alan Ball’s first signing. Ball and Kinkladze’s City experience started disastrously. City collected two points from their first 11 games, scoring just three goals, while Kinkladze struggled; homesick, unable to speak English and living in a Manchester hotel on his own for three months. Juninho was happy in Middlesbrough partly because he’d emigrated with his parents, and Kinkladze’s improvement coincided with the arrival of two Georgian friends and his mother, Khatuna, who brought some home comforts: Georgian cognac and walnuts, and spices to make Kinkladze his favourite dishes.
Kinkladze scored his first goal in November, a late winner in the 1–0 victory over Aston Villa at Maine Road. ‘He was bewildered to start with,’ Ball said afterwards. ‘He spoke very little English and it was foreign to him to tackle and scrap and fight like you do in England. But the boy’s got an immense talent.’ His Premier League spell is best remembered for a couple of truly magnificent goals. The first opened the scoring against Middlesbrough in December 1995, when he collected the ball on the right and dribbled into an inside-left position, before suddenly cutting back inside Phil Stamp and sidefooting the ball firmly into the far corner. Middlesbrough eventually won 4–1, however, with Juninho completing the scoring.
Kinkladze’s
