The story is told from two sides, tending towards legend. For one of them, the Portuguese José Pereira, a Vasco da Gama fan, admired the football of the little Zé de Riba, bought a plane ticket and sent him to São Januário. The other version says that a Flamengo fan took him to Rio, and Vasco got through on a high.
Whichever of the two was right, what was certain was that the short Zé de Riba had his surname changed to Maranhão – as Rio de Janeiro calls all people from Maranhão – and there was a group of big people in Colina. It was February 1959 and, after 18 matches, he scored six goals during amateur training and began to be looked at more closely. But it took him two seasons to become professional – playing 285 games and scoring 14 goals, until the troubled 1967, when Vasco da Gama had three coaches, three football directors and a buffer president.
The other character in this text is a Uruguayan, born in Rivera, a city separated from Livramento in Rio Grande do Sul by a street that he crossed to date Maria de Lourdes. Some time ago, coach Zezé Moreira asked Vasco for a supporter to call the ball for you, treat it with affection and hand it to the attackers, close to the goal, as if he were singing a song that had been very successful, with Nílton César: “ Receive the flowers I give you/And in each flower a kiss from me…”. The guy was called Danilo Menezes and Seu Zezé remembered that he had coached him on the Nacional team in Montevideo. It was 1965 and the guy painted for Colina, at the age of 20, to stay until 1972.
The Maranhão-Danilo Menezes duo, launched by Seu Zezé Moreira, fell apart in 1968, when the Uruguayan was loaned to Bonsucesso. Afterwards, supporter Danilo passed through Olaria and Bangu, and decided to return to Rivera, taking two children from Rio Grande do Sul and two from Rio. In 1972, he returned to Rio de Janeiro and an old Vasco coach, Célio de Sousa, asked him about the possibility of reviving the duo with Maranhão, in the Potiguar ABC de Natal, who would compete in the 1972 Brasileirão. The former partner, when leaving São Januário, ran for the São Paulo companies Comercial de Ribeirão Preto-SP, Ferroviária de Araraquara and São Bento de Sorocaba; by Bahia’s Fluminense from Feira de Santana-BA and Rio’s São Cristóvão. And I was willing to face the challenge.
Danilo Menezes told the São Paulo magazine Placar – Nº 278, of June 25, 1975 – that he only agreed to return to the pitch because he would play alongside his great friend Maranhão, his compadre and whose wives and children were very good friends, in Rio de Janeiro. “We used to go to the cinema together a lot, because we like bang-bang films. But what made our friendship grow was the samba circles”, he says in the report in which Maranhão added: “(Danilo) … goes into a trance with a samba”.
Four seasons after leaving Vasco da Gama, in the ABC-RN team, normally, midfielder Maranhão watched the defense, for Danilo to go further forward. From time to time, they reversed roles. On one of those occasions, facing América-RN, the Uruguayan received a pass, dominated the play and gestured for Maranhão to go up, as the defenders were marking center forward Alberi. Then, he threw the ball into the empty space and Maranhão arrived, taking the shot and scoring a great goal. “,, Kle (Maranhão) threw his shirt to the fans, cried a lot and spent the rest of the game thanking me (for the launch). For me, it was a greater emotion than if I had scored the goal”, said Danilo Menezes.
Without Danilo Menezes on his side, Maranhão faced Vasco da Gam, on October 1, 1972, for the Brazilian Championship, in front of 31,908 paying fans, at the Castelão Stadium, in Natal, with a 2-1 Vasco victory and goals from the midfielders. Alcir and Buglê, exactly, the duo that inherited the places from Maranhão and Danilo Menezes, from 1968, on the Vasco team.
The post Maranhão and Danilo Menezes appeared first in Jornal de Brasília.
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