SAMBA DARTY!
Portela out to be perfect 10
IT IS the most iconic shirt in world football... Brazil’s No.10.
From Pele to Zico and Ronaldinho to Neymar, these Samba star have all conjured up a carnival of skill.
And now, for the first time, that number and those colours will adorn the stage at Alexandra Palace tonight when Diogo Portela becomes the first Brazilian to play at the William Hill World Darts Championship.
Portela, 29, said: “My top is based on the Brazilian football shirt. The No.10 is usually the best player in a football team. I am the best of Brazil – but the only one here as well!
“When I moved to England, it was to pursue my dream to become a dart player.”
That dream becomes a reality as he takes on No.2 seed Peter ‘Snakebite’ Wright.
The Scot’s preparations have been disrupted because he has been suffering from gallstones but Portela is going to savour every moment on the famous oche.
It is some turnaround for a man who knows all about life in a shantytown.
Portela, who is from Rio, said: “For the first 15 years of my life I lived in the bottom of a favela. Not inside but a building at the foot of the hills.
“All of my friends are from favelas and my best two friends still live there.
“I have been around their houses a lot and seen poverty. I have never been rich but I have never been poor. I always had food and these guys didn’t. It was quite hard.
“I was never a guy that got himself into trouble. There were lots of attempted robberies. But I knew everyone, the drug dealers – not friends with them but I knew the names.
“So every time someone approached me with guns or things like that, I would say, ‘I am the friend of blah, blah, blah’. They would say, ‘Okay. Sorry. Don’t say anything’, because if I did say something and told this person, they would kill this guy!
“I never had a problem but at the same time I was clever. Lots of friends struggled and they were forced to sell drugs. It was such a bad environment.”
Pursuing his darts dream, Portela and his wife Ariana planned to move to England and by chance befriended some English football fans.
He said: “At the World Cup in 2014 I had met a couple of guys. They were English. They were friends of my Brazilian darts partner.
“I said, ‘I am moving to England to play darts’. The funny thing is that they play football and wanted to move to Brazil to play there.
“When they came back, after six to seven months in Brazil, I messaged them that I needed a place to stay in London. Only five days before the trip to London I found somewhere at one of their cousins’ house.”
And so his road to the Ally Pally began. It was not all about darts, though. Portela learned English and has been working as a maths teacher in Peckham.
And tonight will aim for the biggest numbers of his life.