Jorginho is one of the great goals that must target Thomas Tuchel since his landing at Stamford Bridge. The midfielder had lost, under Lampard's wing, the importance of the past, accumulating five games without a minute in the Premier between November and December. With the arrival of the former PSG, everything changed. In the premiere of Krumbach against Wolverhampton (0-0) he already gave him the whole game. In fact, of the twelve league games, in ten the Italian-Brazilian has appeared in the starting eleven, subtracting minutes from a once undisputed Kanté.
Now, at 29, he is indisputable, but he is aware that the criticism will always be there. “Everyone has an opinion and I don't always agree with it, but I respect her. It motivates me to work hard and do my best to prove them wrong. Sometimes I feel unappreciated, but it doesn't frustrate me. In these moments I am living a great personal and collective moment, but we cannot relax, you have to keep pushing “, he is sincere in an interview with the Daily Mail.
As you well recognize, sometimes he feels he was the scapegoat and the transfer runrún is always there, but that has not made him lose face to the season. At the most important moment of the course, with the Champions semi-finals against Madrid and the final league sprint on the horizon, he steps firmly. With 37 is the footballer with the highest number of successful entries has done since the change of technician and the third biggest passer on the team (1,101 passes), behind Azpilicueta and Kovacic.
Jorginho's Advanced Statistics. BeSoccer Pro
Perhaps it is the stony path that he has had to travel that has made him develop that resilience. It all started at the age of 14, when he entered an academy in Brusque after leaving his native Imbituba. “I was there for two years and it was the most difficult time. We were 50 teenagers, we trained in the mornings and afternoons and went to school at night. It was very hard. Some colleagues were leaving for Italy and I thought that I could not miss that opportunity, “he contextualizes.
The role of his family was key to taking the step. “TO Sometimes we had to eat the same food for three days. In winter there was no hot water in the showers. One day my mother came to visit me, she saw the place, which was horrible and dirty, and she said: 'You are coming with me, pack your suitcase and let's go (…). I don't want to say it was bullshit, but it was and I had gotten used to it. I told: 'Mama, it's my chance, I'm not leaving because the bathroom is dirty“But his mother resolutely refused, something that made her leave the academy crying over her son's refusal to leave.
Maria Tereza Freitas is the guilty Jorginho's talent for soccer, as she was a successful amateur footballer. “My father usually gets angry when I say this,” he says smiling to the Daily Mail. “My father was bad at soccer, he played goalkeeper. My mother was the one with the talent, but he helped me in other areas “, he clarifies.” I prepare myself mentally and he made me see how hard it would be. “
Life in a monastery for 20 euros per week
Shortly after, he would change the course of his career and go to Italy, to the Hellas Verona quarry. And there, far from beginning a tale full of roses, fate continued to hinder its evolution. “There was a place for the monks and another for the boys from the academy. We slept six in the same room for a year and a half and they paid us 20 euros a week”, Explain. And it is that in the city of Romeo and Juliet he lived in a monastery. The salary, as he counts, was far from the titanic amounts that some boys of his age at that time pocket. Of course, he only has kind words for his time among monks: “They treated us in an incredible way and always with respect.”
However, the dream was still far away and he came to consider leaving football. Until Rafael Pinheiro, now Spezia goalkeeper and then at Verona, made an appearance. “He saw me (in training with the first team), aged 17, and he came to talk to me after training and said, 'What are you doing here, what is your situation?' I told him about it and he went crazy. He said that it was not correct that I was living alone, without my family, for only 20 euros a week “.
A conversation changed his career
The goalkeeper inquired and tried to change his situation, but Jorginho felt exploited and called his mother: “I called her crying and saying that I wanted to leave him and go home (…) I wanted to be close to my friends because I had been away too long and felt that I could not trust anyone else. “But she received a 'no' for an answer and, this time, Maria Tereza Freitas did not consent to her son's reply: “You've been through a lot, eaten the same food every day, without hot water, and now, because of money, do you want to give up? No way. Do you train with the first team and want to give up? I won't let you do it. “
That refusal made him keep fighting. “Thank you mom, thank you dad for the role you have played in my career”he says in the interview. At Hellas Verona he became a man and his good work led him to Napoles in 2014. The arrival of Sarri at Chelsea, his great supporter, made him change Italy for England in 2018, 57 million euros through. Three years later he has jumped the fences that Stamford Bridge had prepared and Jorginho is ready to fight. This is what he has been doing since he left Imbituba when he was 14 years old.