Beautiful, beautiful, sometimes shining. Djalma Feitosa Dias, better known as Djalminha, was one of the green and gold playmakers par excellence. Pure number ten, at the end of the nineties he wrote extraordinary football pages with Superdepor, Deportivo La Coruna which among others could include Roy Maakay or Fran, Flavio Conceicao or Valeron. Those were definitely different times for the Spanish championship, also because the La Liga was won in those years by the blue and whites, specifically in 1999-00. Not only that, also a Copa del Rey (2001-02) and two Spanish Super Cups, as well as reaching a Champions League semi-final history. His palmares also includes a Copa America – in 1997 with Brazil – an Austrian championship and a Brasileirao in 1992. In 2002 he was part of the national team, but then he was not called up for the World Cup in Japan due to a dispute with Irureta who removed from the team for the last period of his life in Galicia.
His best known game was the lambretathe bicycle in Italian, which consists of trapping the ball between the feet and then raising it above the head, trying to jump the man. In reality Djalminha was the perfect “more beautiful than useful” that Agnelli gave to Zidane in unsuspecting times. Who knows what the Brazilian’s lawyer would have thought.
Today Djalminha turns 54.