Which was when his then-wife intervened, telling him to think about his parents – a council worker and a supermarket manager who had supported him since he started playing at the age of five. Ditching it all would, she said, show a lack of respect to them. Paulinho http://www.authenticmapleleafsstore.com/-29-felix-potvin-jersey_c-470.html and his wife had just had a baby daughter too and, besides, she asked: ‘What else can you do?’ Authentic Johnny Pesky Jersey It is a good question. What would he have done? Paulinho smiles. “I really don’t know,” he says. “She said: ‘The only thing you know how to do is play football.’” And so that is what he did. 
About a month later, Paulinho rejoined Pão de Açúcar in the fourth division, effectively an amateur. Almost a decade on, he is preparing for the world’s biggest club game, a starter for Barcelona in Saturday’s clásico. The highest-scoring midfielder in Spain, his team are six points clear at the top and 11 ahead of their rivals, and this summer he will be in the heart of the Brazil team who are favourites in Russia. “If someone had said then that I would be preparing to play in the World Cup and at Barcelona, I would have said: ‘Never!’” he grins. “Never, ever.” However the “then” Paulinho is talking about is not 2008, it is 2015. It is not that he gave up once a long time ago; it is that others routinely gave up on him. He tells his story steadily, dating every decision. “It’s been a rollercoaster,” he says. He has played in six countries in three continents, been a Copa Libertadores champion and relegated too, suffered the greatest humiliation in Brazil’s history and been abused, unpaid, written off. And now look. Paulinho’s professional career began when, aged 16, he left home for Lithuania; it ended aged 26 when he left London for China. Or at least it was supposed to, Guangzhou his particular graveyard. “When I went, everyone said that was it: my career was over,” Paulinho says. The question is simple: why go? The answer is simple, stark too: there was a prospect worse – staying at Tottenham. After a year at Vilnius, Paulinho left for Lodz, returning to Brazil in the summer of 2008. He won promotion with Pão de Açúcar before joining Bragantino in the second division. From there Alan Trammell Jersey he headed to Corinthians, where he won the Brazilian title, the Libertadores and the Club World Cup. Having turned down Internazionale, he joined Tottenham the following year for a club-record £17m. The Premier League should have suited him, he admits, but within two years he was desperate to go. “I wouldn’t say Nathan MacKinnon Youth jersey it was a relief to leave Spurs but it was clear I had to,” he says. “It was a difficult time. “[André] Villas-Boas bought me in July 2013 and in December Villas-Boas goes. He’d wanted me, we’d spoken a lot, and then six months later Tim Sherwood was in charge. There was no problem with him – he was very young, a good coach – but the team wasn’t doing well and he came under pressure to change things. He did things a little differently but I still played the last eight or nine games that season. Then http://www.footballjaguarsofficial.com/Authentic-Calais-Campbell-Jersey came the change from Sherwood to Mauricio Pochettino.” Something else came too. As Paulinho sets the scene, Belo Horizonte comes into view. He was brought on at half-time in the semi-final of the 2014 World Cup with the hosts 5-0 down to Germany and, as he discusses his return to Spurs afterwards, it is clear how much of an impact Brazil’s 7-1 defeat had. “The problem was that this came after the World Cup, with me trying to get back to some normality. I was the last back and to have gone out of the World Cup that way with Brazil at home …” he says pausing, his train of thought lost a little. NFL Jerseys China Wholesale Jerseys Free Shipping NHL Jerseys China Wholesale NFL Jerseys Nike Nike NFL Jerseys Wholesale Cheap NFL Jerseys Free Shipping Discount NFL Jerseys