Fernandinho is contemplating defeat. The kind of infuriating, inexplicable defeats that keep Manchester City’s £30million midfielder awake at night.
‘It feels like a hurricane, a tornado inside my head,’ says the Brazilian. ‘I can’t sleep after we’ve lost. I end up going to bed at 4am.
‘There’s a lot of emotion. In my mind I’m going through what we did wrong and how it could have happened.’
It has happened too often for Fernandinho’s liking this season. City’s 7-0 demolition of Norwich last weekend might have maintained their impressive 100 per cent home record in the Premier League, scoring an average of four goals a game in the process, but away from the Etihad it has been a very different story.
Five games, three defeats. To Cardiff, Aston Villa and Chelsea. Pn Sunday, City travel to the Stadium of Light where, worryingly, they have lost to Sunderland on each of their last three visits.
A UEFA Cup winner and Ukrainian champion six times over with Shakhtar Donetsk, Fernandinho doesn’t take well to failure.
‘Being somewhere just to be there, that’s not me – I want to win absolutely everything,’ says a player who is puzzled by City’s setbacks this season after investing in nearly £100m-worth of new talent in the summer.
‘I am surprised, especially the way we’ve lost. It’s different if you play badly. You can’t get into the box, everyone’s making different decisions and you’re not gelling.
‘When you’re playing better than the other team, it’s difficult to accept.
‘But if you can give me an example of a team that was built in two months and everything went well I’d like to hear it. It’s normal to take some tumbles at the beginning.’
It’s a cold, wet autumn day in Cheshire but Fernando Luiz Roza, to give him his full name, has turned up in a t-shirt. Safe to say, this is not your typical Brazilian import.
City know the sort. After all, they blew £50m on Robinho and Jo. Across town at Manchester United they still shudder at the mention of Kleberson while Anderson’s days at Old Trafford would appear to be numbered.
Fernandinho comes across differently. There is a steely resolve that helped keep him going through eight freezing winters in Donetsk, where it was so cold he once set up a barbecue in his garage, and then saw him kiss goodbye to £4m in bonuses because he was determined to secure a move to City in June.
New manager Manuel Pellegrini and director of football Txiki Begiristain made him their primary target from the outset, even though many questioned the wisdom of paying so much for a predominantly defensive midfielder who had just turned 28. Some still do given that his performances so far have been steady rather than spectacular.
Club insiders talk about a reliable, down-to-earth character on and off the pitch. Like chalk and cheese compared to Robinho was one description.
A video dedicated to him on City’s website is accompanied by the obligatory samba music but there is a conspicuous lack of fancy tricks, just their new No.25 knocking down a series of opponents in a manner more reminiscent of Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris than Ronaldinho.
‘Do you think I should change my style?’ he smiles. ‘When you tell a lot of Brazilians they are going to play in Europe it can be a bit of a shock or even intimidating, but I’ve been preparing for it for 10 years and now I’m here.
‘It’s always been a plan of mine to be playing in a big club in a big league. I was constantly looking at what Europeans like, how they play and what they do.
‘Yes there have been other Brazilian players who have come and maybe haven’t done so well.
‘It might be a weird thing about me but I’m never had a problem. I left home when I was 17 and moved to a city and did fine. I moved to the Ukraine where it’s unbelievably cold compared to Brazil but I did really well.
‘What happens with a lot with footballers, if they have a problem with the weather, the food, the culture, sometimes it’s none of those things. It’s the actual person.
‘I don’t miss anything about Ukraine or Brazil. I’m the kind of person who likes to live moment by moment so I’m concentrating on the here and now.’
His was a typical upbringing in the southern Brazilian city of Londrina – the former British settlement of Little London – playing football for hours on end outside the family home using flip flops for goalposts.
A young Fernandinho left home and moved to Atletico Paranaense in the state capital Curitiba for three years before Shakhtar persuaded him to join the ever-increasing Brazilian contingent in Ukraine.
Tottenham tried to sign him and so did Chelsea after he scored against them in the Champions League group stage last season, but it was City who got their man.
‘They were the team that made me feel completely 100 per cent assured in how much they wanted me,’ he says. ‘That was something the other teams maybe didn’t do.
‘I let that money (the bonuses) go because it was the right move for me. Whether other players should do it or not is difficult because everyone thinks with a different mindset. For me, I did it at the right time.’
Instead, Spurs signed Paulinho and Chelsea brought in Fernandinho’s former Shakhtar teammate Willian. All three are competing for a place in Brazil’s midfield with the World Cup set to kick off in their homeland in seven months’ time.
It’s an intriguing sub-plot and one of the reasons why Fernandinho, concerned over his modest total of five international caps, wanted a higher profile by moving to the Premier League.
‘Willian I obviously know very well,’ he says. ‘We are friends and speak often. But I’ve never met Paulinho.
‘Each one of us has to defend their team and win the title first and foremost. When it comes to the World Cup all of us want to be involved so we will all do what it takes. But the decision isn’t ours. All we can do is show what we can do on the pitch.’
Tatooed on the inside of Fernandinho’s left wrist is the name of his wife, Glaucia. The couple are settling into English life and she hopes to begin a university course now their young son Davi has started school.
Fernandinho already speaks Portuguese, Russian, Italian and Spanish, and is picking up English quickly even though he still prefers to conduct interviews through an interpreter.
The boy who used to follow his father to all his games and copied him to the extent of tying his bootlaces in the same way now watches his own son playing in the back garden of their new home, inseparable from a ball.
‘All day every day he’s playing football,’ he says. ‘If it’s up to me, he’ll be better than his dad.’
It is, you suspect, the only defeat that Fernandinho would be prepared to accept
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