INVINCIBLE!
Not only was Gilberto Silva a star of Arsenal’s unbeaten season, he never lost to Spurs in 11 league derbies!
TOMORROW, at lunchtime, Edu will make a familiar trip across north London. Only this time, Arsenal’s technical director will have to make do without his ‘little brother’.
Gilberto Silva must watch from afar as Arsenal travel to Spurs for a deserted derby which could define their landscape for months to come. Between them, the two Brazilians faced Spurs 15 times in the Premier League with Gilberto featuring in 11 fixtures. Defeats? None. Titles won on enemy territory? One.
Mikel Arteta’s task tomorrow is rather less glamorous, but no less significant in the hunt for Europe.
‘He knows the club, he played under Arsene Wenger, he worked with Pep Guardiola and I’m sure he learned from both of them and the other managers he worked with,’ Silva says. ‘He can do good work for the club.’
This will be Arsenal’s first trip to the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, the glinting symbol of a recent power shift in north London.
It will also be Edu’s first visit to Spurs since he returned to the club. These days, at least, he no longer has to play mentor, translator and personal shopper to a fellow Invincible, Silva.
‘He was like my big brother,’ Silva, now 43, tells Sportsmail from Brazil. ‘Many times I went to his house to eat. Once he went to the supermarket with his wife Paula and when they got home there was one bag separate. He went to take it and she said, “Oh, this is for Gilberto”.’
Silva arrived a year after Edu on the back of World Cup triumph in 2002, blissfully unaware of the finer points of English football.
He recalls a trip to Cardiff before his first season to play Liverpool.
‘I said to him, “Edu where are we going?” He said we were going to play a game — for me it was a friendly after pre-season because in Brazil that was quite common.’
Silva started on the bench, before replacing Edu and netting the winner. ‘It was nice to score on my debut and after the game everyneeds body was celebrating. Then a trophy came. I asked him, “Edu, we won the game and there’s a trophy?” He replied, “Yeah, this is the Community Shield”.’
Four more pieces of silverware and an unbeaten season would follow. But more than a decade after his departure, the hole Silva left has never really been filled.
‘It’s good when people realise how important my job for the team was,’ he says. ‘All these years they haven’t found a player to be in this position to give better stability.’
But it is not just the Arsenal midfield that interests Gilberto. Fellow Brazilian Fred is battling to bring balance to Manchester United, too. And for the past three years, Gilberto has been his agent, mentoring him on his own journey.
‘His first year was hard — he came from the World Cup, didn’t play, had injuries, he got married,’ Gilberto says. Slowly, Fred found his feet. Now £52million doesn’t seem such a waste.
‘Hard work pays off,’ Gilberto says. ‘But you cannot stop. He to keep his focus. He is hungry to learn too, because he wants to achieve things, he wants to be a champion.’
For now that luxury is Liverpool’s after a season interrupted by Covid-19 and marked by political activism. Football’s commitment to the Black Lives Matter movement has seen many players use their platform to push for change.
‘It’s important players stand up and use their voice,’ Gilberto says. ‘I disagree when they say players cannot get involved in the political side of society. Players are part of society. And they are a loud voice.’
Silva has suffered racism on the pitch as well. ‘Once playing for Arsenal, we went to Holland to play against PSV (in 2002),’ he begins. ‘At half-time Thierry Henry arrived in the dressing room very angry, shouting in French... I thought it was about the team, our performance. Edu explained that fans were making monkey sounds outside.’
At Panathinaikos it happened again. ‘Somewhere we played up in northern Greece, they threw an inflatable banana at Djibril Cisse,’ Gilberto says. ‘When I saw him stop and react towards the fans, I ran after him and told him, “No, forget them, we need you.” At halftime everyone was very upset.’
Then, against Panionios, more racism. ‘I was warming up and suddenly two fans made monkey gestures.’ So Gilberto decided to mock them. ‘My reaction was to do the same... it’s like a mirror for them just to see how bad it was to have that gesture.
‘And they stopped immediately because, I guess, they would not expect me to do that. Then I started making some funny faces to them, I started to kiss my skin.’
Now, five years after hanging up his boots, the 43-year-old runs a hotel, hosts a podcast talking to icons of sport (an episode with Edu comes out next week), works as an agent and invests in fan engagement platform TruChallenge.
Gilberto moved his family back to London last year. They lived in Victoria, but coronavirus has left him marooned in Brazil. His focus is back on Hotel Samba, his hometown venture where the walls are painted red and white.
A regular at the Emirates before the pandemic, could Gilberto now be persuaded to work for the club again? ‘You never know,’ he says. ‘Arsenal hold a special place in my heart and if one day I get an invitation from the club of course I’d think in a special way about it.’
Something to ponder for Edu. At least he knows this time he wouldn’t have to do all the shopping.