'Liedshow' sparkles for Sporting

By Onofre Costa

While he was a passionate player at amateur level, if you had told 21-year-old Brazilian supermarket employee Liedson da Silva Muniz that he would be a footballing success story in Europe within five years, he would have been more than a little surprised.

Slender player
The slender striker, who is 1.75m tall and weighs just 63kg, has been greeted with scepticism ever since he quit shelf-stacking for professional football, and when he went from a loan spell at Brazilian side SC Corinthians to a €2m move to Sporting Clube de Portugal in the summer of 2003, he had to prove himself again.

Popular suspicion
"Before I came to Sporting I was more or less used to hearing comments on my background," he told uefa.com. "People were a little bit suspicious about my football but little by little, with humility and hard work, I showed everybody I had enough quality to be in the squad as I did here at Sporting."

Goalscoring record
Sporting clearly had faith in the player whose contract had been shared between Prudentópolis and Coritiba FC before the Lisbon club bought them out, and that faith was been repaid in style as Liedson chimed in with 15 goals in 30 games in his first season in Portugal.

Tbilisi hat-trick
This season, his speed, technique and deceptively impressive heading ability have put him joint top of the Portuguese goalscorers' chart with nine from eleven SuperLiga games, while a hat-trick against FC Dinamo Tbilisi in Georgia last week lifted his UEFA Cup tally for the season to five.

Confidence growing
"For me, this season has been very good," he admitted. "There's a long way to go before we reach our targets but we've been doing well in the UEFA Cup and the Portuguese championship and I hope we can keep winning regularly. The team is very strong and growing in confidence each time we play. That's very important."

Format fan
The Brazilian Under-23 international knows how important the European campaign is for Sporting's ambitions and is a strong supporter of the new UEFA Cup format, which guarantees clubs a certain number of matches in Europe if they reach the group phase following the two-legged first round.

'Legitimate hopes'
"UEFA had a wonderful idea with this new format of the competition," said Liedson. "It's very good. We play more and it gives us more time to study our opponents. In the knockout phase everything is very fast but with the group stage I think we have legitimate hopes of going further."

Emphatic wins
After beating Panionios NFC 4-1 at home and then overcoming Dinamo 4-0 in Georgia, Sporting are one of the three top scorers in the group stage along with VfB Stuttgart and Rangers FC, but Liedson is sure that - with FC Sochaux-Montbéliard and Newcastle United FC to come - goals will be harder to come by.

Determined approach
"I don't know if I will continue to score as many as I have so far but I can promise I am going to work very hard in order to keep delivering," said Liedson. "Sporting have plenty of quality players who can score goals at any time so the most important thing for me is to help our squad to succeed."

Lisbon hope
With this season's final being held at Sporting's Estádio de Alvalade, coach José Peseiro needs Liedson to play a starring role. Sporting have only won one game this season without Liedson scoring. He is doing very well, but if Sporting are to take the trophy, the man they call 'Liedshow' must go on.