Nottingham Forest midfielder Tiago Silva has given a very long interview to Portuguese outlet Mais Futebol on Wednesday.
Despite having a lot to say about the Coronavirus crisis and how he’s been dealing with it, the website released a part of the chat where he only talks about his time in the Championship.
Silva was signed from Portuguese side Feirense last summer, and managed to have a quick adaptation to English football, already having 38 appearances for Forest.
Asked if he knew something about the club before signing for them, he says he had to look for some information first.
“At the time, I only knew that they had won two Champions Leagues and that they were a historic club, but also because I researched it,” Tiago Silva told Mais Futebol. “But now, I’m very familiar with that because the club also shares a lot of information about that time.”
Regarding how Portuguese players are seen at the club, he says this new generation has been changing their image a little bit.
“Now, yes! I’m not sure what it was like before arriving, just that they liked João and Tobias very much, but it seems that some other Portuguese who passed through here, they didn’t fall for them. When I go to the barber, for example, they tell me that the Portuguese are the soul of the team: ‘Not last year, but you…’ And I think we’ve come to change the image they had of the Portuguese a little bit. They say: ‘You are small and you’re still hitting them there.’ They ask for effort.”
“No doubt! I don’t want to die without experiencing the Premier League. I think it’s the peak of any player’s career, naturally leaving the national team aside. But I also have the ambition of one day playing in Spain. I even had the opportunity to say that in an interview not long ago: Spanish football is often too well played and even annoying. People watch Barcelona play and say that it already bores: that short football… But that’s what captivates me: well played football. I’m not saying that I don’t like football played in England. I do! But it’s played more with the heart than with the head. And not Spain: everything there is very well thought out and beautiful.”
But he now admits he’d miss the intensity and the atmosphere from English football.
“Very likely! And I already thought about it: I have adapted well and it will be difficult to live on less than this when I leave here. And when I say ‘less than this’, I mean the atmosphere. But I was lucky to be able to come to the best country in the world for football: because everything that involves football in England is the best. Maybe I should have done the opposite: try Spain first and then, if I got tired of beautiful football, England to get the body tired [laughs].”
Silva also talked about the elastico (the flip-flap skill, sometimes called a dummy) he did in a match against Derby County this season, with the video going viral on social media.
“I received a lot more messages after that ‘elastico’ [laughs]. That was shared everywhere. By Maisfutebol, for example, and by Eleven Sports. I remember that on that day, after the game, I traveled to Portugal with Tobias and the assistant coach, Baltazar. We entered Heathrow airport and when I entered the tunnel for the plane my phone started to vibrate until I lost the network. I commented that someone had identified me on that move. He warned me that soon it’d be going viral. When we landed in Portugal, I realised. My God: everything vibrating, 200 and such notifications on Instagram, messages on Whatsapp, my friends in groups sending me the video. I was aware of what I did, because my teammates commented to me when the game was over, but I never thought it would have that impact.”
Tiago Silva has also been asked about Manchester United star Bruno Fernandes, and said Nottingham Forest players didn’t expect him to be so good.
“By the way, when he arrived some players commented in our dressing room that they thought he was not a player for United. We Portuguese only said that they would be surprised when they saw him play: he’s a superstar and is proving it.”
