Elano: 'Before the winter the pitches are firm and that makes the difference for me'

It's a long way from the elegant beaches of Santos to Manchester, even for a Brazilian midfielder who has just wandered out of training to find his own national flag fluttering in a brisk afternoon breeze. The words "It's just like watching City" are scrawled across it – much to the bemusement of Elano Blumer, whose English lessons have not quite stretched to City fans' humour yet. He stops to sign it for a group of fans whose general state of excitement contributes to a significant mistake when they spell out the message for a card he is also being asked to sign. "Hoppy Birthday," it reads before this surreal exchange concludes, all participants parting company with smiles as wide as the surrounding fields of Carrington.

Here, in a nutshell, is the effect that Elano has had on those with an affinity for Manchester City. It's all been a bit giddy at times for a set of fans unaccustomed to the words "City" and "Europe" being uttered in the same breath and it really was like watching Brazil on that sunny Sunday afternoon back in September when the side's newfound playmaker mesmerised Newcastle United and then broke them with a free-kick which, even he admits, was the best goal he has scored. "The most beautiful."

Then, when the 26-year-old's footballing iridescence led Sven Goran Eriksson to compare him with some of his finest charges in Italy – Roberto Mancini, Roberto Baggio and Ruud Gullit – and to respond, when asked why England had always lacked the elegance of his City side, with the words "I never had a player like Elano" – the sky seemed the limit. It still is, as far as Eriksson is concerned, though the player is far enough removed from the pomp and circumstance of top-flight football to tell you that dominance in the Premier League is hard to sustain.

"Before the winter the pitches are firm and that makes the difference for me," Elano says, when talk turns to the kind of subject which would terminate an interview with some players: his struggle to recapture the form of last autumn. "The studs are higher then. Because of the weather and the way the pitches are, there have been difficulties for my game. I'm used to two weeks off in the mid-season, too. That's been hard to adjust to. It's just a question of development and adjustment for me." Today's trip to relegation-threatened Bolton will be as tough as most.

But adjusting is something Elano has been doing most of his footballing life. The only subject which animates him quite like the subject of how to regain those command performances is the difficult formative period in his career; days when he gave up picking sugar cane with his father, Geraldo, at Iracemapolis in São Paolo state (population: 20,000) to take a shot at football with the Guarani club amid the big lights of Campinas. "There is no other footballer in my city, let alone my family," he recalls. "But my father would say, 'Come on son, learn how to play or you'll have to cut sugar cane for the rest of your life', so I put a rucksack over my shoulder with my boots and shin pads in it. When I arrived with Ismael, the scout, there was about 600 kids waiting to be tested."

For a time, this meant leaving home at 8.30am and returning 15 hours later, with two or three bus connections to negotiate along the way. Then he graduated to lodgings with 40 other young players in the club compound, became a ball boy at the club's "Golden Earring" stadium and signed a professional contract at the age of 16.

But the struggles which have characterised his career began right there. He left Guarani in 2000, bereft of first-team appearances and "deeply sad", joined Internacional de Limiera in the São Paolo State Division, again struggled for regular first-team football and it was only his strike rate in the reserves (top scorer with 13 in the 1999-2000 season) which attracted the attention of Santos – then a deeply troubled club. Their lack of silverware across 17 years bore some resemblance to City's plight (32 years and counting) though the reaction of their fans was slightly different.

"The supporters were very aggressive," Elano recalls. "They used to beat up players, smashing their cars, because there were a lot of famous football players but the team was not performing well."

So began comfortably the most successful period in the career of the man who was to become known by the team from Vila Belmiro as Curinga La Vila (the Village Joker) by virtue of his ability to play in any position but goal. In 2002, the coach Emerson Leao concluded that the expensively assembled stars of the side should go and a bunch of unknown youngsters – Robinho, Diego, Alex, Elano and others – would replace them as Pele's former club pushed again for the missing silverware. The "Village Boys" took Brazil by storm, clinched the Brasileirão title and fell just short in the Copa Libertadores in 2003. They retained the title the following year under the charge of Vanderlei Luxemburgo – who later reflected that "without Elano, the team simply wouldn't work".

Eriksson's rebuilding at City has called those days to mind for Elano. "It has made me remember the time when I arrived in Santos," he says. "It's a gamble. Every time you buy a lot of players in one season things can either go right or go badly wrong."

When the time came for a move that would provide some financial security, Elano's was eye-catching. It took him to Shakhtar Donetsk and the cold prairies of the Ukraine, with their -23C temperatures – an improbable destination for a player who had attracted Atletico Madrid's interest, but one where, as many of his countrymen have discovered, there is the new money of the former Soviet states to be earned. The style of football was hardly Brazilian – "a lot of running but not much thinking, you have two major teams, Shakhtar and [Dynamo] Kiev and that's it" – is his most diplomatic stab at describing it. And there were also some off-the field adjustments to make. "In Ukraine, there's no place to go after training or playing a match. It's hard to develop your own life. I got rice and meat shipped in from Brazil and we depended on a certain hotel we liked."

There was also that familiar lack of first-team football – 38 appearances in three years – and the player's hopes of a place in Carlos Alberto Parreira's 2006 World Cup squad were reduced to shreds. That's why no deliberation was required when, while sitting at home with his wife, Alexandra, and daughter, Maria Teresa, one day, the call came from his agent, asking was he interested in joining Manchester City. Parreira's replacement, Dunga, it later transpired, had pointed Elano out to Eriksson.

"I didn't know Mr Eriksson, beyond knowing he managed the England team, but it was an answer to my prayers, something I had hoped and prayed might happen," Elano says. City's season has surpassed many expectations but as it draws towards a close with Uefa Cup qualification dashed and even the Intertoto Cup a distant hope, Elano is left to reflect on whether he and the side can now take the next step. "When I arrived here nobody knew me. I'd played here against Argentina and Portugal but not particularly well," he says (neglecting to mention that he scored twice in the first of those two.) "For a time there was space, but now I find that I have to play on my own because I always have a player marking me. I'm coping with it – but that is causing difficulties for my game.

"The game is very different here. In Brazil it's very technical. Very rarely do you see a long pass [while] here you can get 12 or 15 in a match. The other difference is the aggression, the pace of the game. In Brazil we keep the ball at our feet and passing becomes much easier."

Eriksson's influence will be critical to the transition. The two are close and speak a lot (the Swede's grasp of Portuguese from his Benfica days helps) and never was his mentor's role better illustrated than the wild January afternoon at Bramall Lane where, with blue balloons inviting chaos, Gary Speed's physical marking of Elano rattled him so much that Eriksson substituted him at half-time.

"The pitch was quite bad that day, the ball was always in the air and that's not always my strong point," Elano recalls. "Also the opposition player punched me twice in the back. I'm a man and you can't spend the whole match being kicked and punched. I accepted [being substituted] because I knew the way things were going I would be causing more difficulties to the team."

Eriksson has the measure of this situation. "It's different when he plays for the [Brazilian] national team [because] if you want to mark man-to-man there you have to mark a lot of them, with Kaka and Ronaldinho," he says. "He's a clever young man so he will stand up to it for sure."

To what extent the Brazilian might prevail seems to depend on how City now reinforce, with their owner Thaksin Shinawatra's insistence this week that he wants Champions League football within three years suggesting he might dig deep. Elano does not dissent from the notion that the weight of responsibility on him has been onerous at times – "It's why the new signings [Nery] Castillo and Benjani are important," he says. "The strength of those players helps when things are tough" – and the evidence of the past few months suggests that, despite a more robust approach to the game than the Samba-style which Juninho first delivered to northern England, Elano is not cut out as one of football's hod carriers.

The Brazilian's afternoon plans as Dietmar Hamann chauffeurs him out of Carrington in his VW suggest he is here for the long term. There is some house-hunting in the Wilmslow footballer belt lined up and his love of the artificial ski slope off the M60 and the restaurants of south Cheshire suggest this place is far removed from Ukraine. "I want to be here for the next seven or eight years and then I'll go back to Brazil to finish my career with Santos," he says. "It's taken some time to find the right place for me outside Brazil but I'm happy with what I'm producing for the club and I think the feeling is mutual."

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