Latest news with #Cerro
Yahoo
10-04-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
📹 Ríos plays'hero and villain', Palmeiras remain undefeated
This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇧🇷 here. It wasn't easy. Veiga left the game with a possible injury. And Richard Ríos was in the fans' crosshairs. But Palmeiras came out on top against Cerro Porteño this Wednesday (9), at Allianz. Thanks to a goal from Ríos himself, Verdão won 1 x 0. They continue 100% in Group G of the Libertadores. And now, in sole tension, and relief... with a scolding! Veiga left the game just 12 minutes in with a possible injury to his left shoulder. Felipe Anderson was called upon, but little changed immediately. Palmeiras took a while to get a well-positioned rival involved in their field. And who was trying to surprise. The higher technical quality of the alviverde would show, starting with the beautiful launch by Murilo. It was up to Ríos to convert and ask for silence from the fans (41') - and to be targeted by them at the end of the first half. The second almost came after a beautiful pass from Vitor Roque to Estêvão. Vitor Roque almost there It wasn't this time that the most expensive reinforcement in Palmeiras' history scored his goal. Vitor Roque even scored. But the VAR indicated offside after he was called by Felipe Anderson. Cerro tried. But it was up to Abel's team to have more concrete goal opportunities. But without taking advantage of them. Flaco López, for example, had two. 📊 Table and schedule 📅 Palmeiras reaches six points. Bolívar and Cerro have three. Sporting Cristal remains at zero. Verdão will only play in the Liberta again on the 24th of this month, when they will face the altitude of La Paz and Bolívar. Cerro will host Cristal on the same day. On Saturday (12), Verdão will face the derby against Corinthians at Arena Barueri. 📸 Alexandre Schneider - 2025 Getty Images
New York Times
05-02-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
Manchester United's Diego Leon: ‘Daring' left-back, raw talent, dreamer
Diego Leon calls himself a dreamer, but even he cannot quite have envisaged this — the sheer, pin-your-ears-back speed of the whole thing. In the middle of last year, he was a nobody. A youth-team player at Cerro Porteno in Paraguay, he had potential, sure, but that was about it. He could have walked down the street in his own village without anyone batting an eyelid. Advertisement Now, he is a Manchester United player. Or at least he will be in the summer. He cannot move to England yet because he is only 17, still a kid. He is also just 21 matches into his senior career. Given that modest body of work, the signing is evidently a calculated gamble from United's point of view. They have bought Leon based on what he might become rather than what he is now. All due caveats apply. Still, watching him in action, you can see the potential. Leon, even at this early stage, is a dashing buccaneer of a left back, forever setting off in search of adventure in the final third. He is strong, quick and brave. Those who have coached him also say that he has the mentality to cope with the demands that await him. 'He is bold and happy to take responsibility,' says Manolo Jimenez, who gave Leon his first-team debut in August. 'Diego has a strong personality. That will help him a lot.' Julio Meza, the academy coordinator at Cerro, shares that view. 'He has the talent and the character to do well in the Premier League,' he says. 'No one here doubts him.' Leon grew up in Juan Emilio O'Leary, a farming community not far from the Brazilian border. His parents worked the land and looked after the family's livestock. Diego was the youngest of nine children. He honed his football skills around the farm with a ball of rags, later graduating to the rough scrubland pitches that predominate in the poorer parts of South America. Aged 14, he was recommended to Mario Grana, a former Cerro player who was working in the club's youth system. 'He came to try out with some other boys,' Grana tells The Athletic. 'He really impressed me from the first moment. He went forward well from full-back and was always very determined to do so. He would pop up in the final third time and time again. He did it naturally; you could see he was always looking for the goal.' Advertisement Leon did well for the under-14s and under-15s. In late 2023, he played outside Paraguay for the first time as Cerro appeared at the Adidas Flamengo Cup in Brazil. At the start of 2024, he moved up to Cerro's under-17 team. His coach at that level was Badayco Maciel, who immediately knew that he had a proper player on his hands. 'His physical strength was noticeable,' Maciel says. 'He was technically good and had a change of pace. He was an attacking full-back, but he didn't just go up the outside; he drove inside to get into the box and took shots. He was confident and he was daring.' Off the pitch, though, there were a few small doubts. 'He was seen as a player with the potential to reach the first team, but somewhat immature in his behaviour,' explains Maciel. 'I spoke to him a lot about it in pre-season. We agreed he had to mature as a player and as a person; that he had to go from being a kid to being a man. 'He had to start think differently and become more serious in every respect if he wanted to be a professional.' Those conversations lit a fire under Leon. He knuckled down and became the standout player in Maciel's side, scoring nine times in the 28-game under-17 Paraguayan championship. Leon was not initially in Jimenez's plans. The latter, who arrived at Cerro in March, already had two good left-backs: Santiago Arzamendia and Miguel Benitez. He was set. Then he wasn't. Arzamendia returned to Cadiz, his parent club, and Benitez picked up a series of injuries that kept him out of the team. Jimenez tried playing a right back on the left in a couple of matches but did not view that as a viable option in the long term. 'So I gambled on Diego,' he says. Asked to describe the youngster's game, the Spaniard reels off a list of attributes. 'Diego is a powerful, vertical player,' he tells The Athletic. 'He can beat defenders on the outside and put crosses in, or come inside, on the diagonal, towards goal. He has a good shot on him. He's not bad in the air, but he can improve. As an attacking player, he has serious quality.' Advertisement That much quickly became clear to the Cerro fans. Leon scored on debut against Sportivo Ameliano, heading home a cross from the right after nipping in front of his marker. He then repeated the trick against General Caballero a week later, making a surging run from deep and jinking past a defender before finishing calmly from the edge of the area. 'Many people thought I was mad to play a 17-year-old but he justified the decision in those first games,' says Jimenez. 'I set a challenge and he responded.' Leon was a regular in the side thereafter. There would be no further goals — not for lack of trying — but his forays forward became a feature of Cerro's play. Jimenez even rejigged his system to accommodate him. 'I played him behind a winger who liked to move inside, so he had the whole flank open to attack,' Jimenez says. 'One of the central midfielders would move across and cover his area when we went forward. The idea was for him to have less responsibility, less pressure.' What is going unsaid here is that Leon needs to improve the defensive side of his game. He is a fearless tackler but sometimes commits himself too quickly. He is prone to ball-watching when he should be repositioning himself. 'He needs to work on his attention levels and try to bring a bit of order to his defensive game,' says Meza. 'That sometimes betrays him a bit.' Jimenez, who now manages APOEL in Cyprus, agrees. 'Diego has to improve his decision-making,' he says. 'He has to work on his intuition, to know that you can't always dive in. Sometimes, instead of making a foul or being overrun, you have to know how to hold your opponent up, wait for cover. There's a lot of room for improvement there. But these are not hard things to learn. He will get there if he works hard.' Those around Leon — in Paraguay in the short term, then in Manchester — will also need to provide the right kind of emotional support. He had to be consoled on the pitch by team-mates after gifting Olimpia a goal in August, and cried down the phone to his parents after scoring a costly own goal against Sportivo Luqueno. Advertisement 'For a young boy from the countryside who comes to the capital, joins a big club and gets into the first team at a very young age, everything is chaotic,' says Jimenez. 'Every player makes mistakes, but they affected him. He has to have the right environment, so he can carry the weight of being famous before adulthood. We have to remember that he's only a boy.' That last line, really, should be the final word when it comes to any assessment of a 17-year-old. For what it's worth, though, Jimenez believes that he will make it. 'He has the quality and he does not lack the desire,' he says. 'With hard work and time to adapt, I believe that he can improve even more and become an important player.' As for Leon himself, his excitement at his breakneck ascent was probably best summed up in an interview on Paraguayan television after his debut. After the final whistle, dozens of kids from the Cerro youth team, many of them his under-17 team-mates, entered the pitch to pay him an emotional tribute. 'It's a unique feeling, something every kid dreams of,' Leon said. 'I invite you to dream. I'm a dreamer, too.'
