Soccer: The quiet man to stir United

If Sir Alex Ferguson actually attached significance to such things - and he doesn't - you could be forgiven for thinking that he sought to put the loss of Cristiano Ronaldo out of mind by signing a diametrically opposite personality.

Ronaldo left Manchester United's right wing and status as much-treasured playmaker for the Spanish giants Real Madrid and, after his last match against Arsenal in May, stopped his Bentley to sign programmes pushed through the windows by supporters at the lights on John Gilbert Way.

Antonio Valencia drove into Old Trafford two months later in a fairly old BMW 3-series - the same one he'd been driving at Wigan.

He still hasn't changed the three-year-old car and, after just a few minutes in his company you sense that a Bentley is not for him.

Valencia is a reluctant occupant of the spotlight - this is his first newspaper interview since the £16m ($35.8m) summer transfer - and the kind of profile Ronaldo enjoyed does not sit well with a player whose name elicits the same response from every Spanish-speaking journalist who has observed his development: tranquilo, quiet and relaxed.

As he embarks on a discussion of his United story so far, which following a period of adjustment has seen him score four goals in the last 10 matches (more than he managed in each of his three seasons at Wigan Athletic), he is keen to make one point clear: he is not at his new club to fill Ronaldo's boots.

"I am my own man," he says immediately, when Ronaldo's name crops up.

"I thought Cristiano was a very good player but I play according to what I think and what I want to do at that particular moment and what I know. I never imitate anyone."

It becomes clear that Ferguson just told him to blank out the Ronaldo comparisons as best he could.

"He said, 'You don't have to follow Cristiano but you do have to work' - and I'm doing that," Valencia says.

"He said, 'Enjoy it, enjoy Manchester. Do things well."'

As he settles back, his unlaboured assertion complete, you begin to see why Rio Ferdinand has likened Valencia to Paul Scholes in his efforts to keep things low-key.

The 24-year-old doesn't disagree with the assessment.

"I like to spend time at home with my partner and my family. I never look out for a photo opportunity. If that's what Paul is like then, yes, the comparison is correct."

But the similarities stop there. Valencia's road to Old Trafford has been a long and winding one, even though the last leg was a mere 20 miles down the road.

It started out in Lago Agrio, a small town in the north-east of Ecuador, where the rivers and rainforests of the country's Amazon basin have been polluted by the oil industry, and the proximity of Colombia's Putumayo region - the heart of the Latin American cocaine trade - makes for a dangerous way of life amid the warring paramilitary groups and refugees fleeing the violence.

Valencia's home was also a long way from the Chota valley, the mining region which produced the few other Ecuadorean players who have made it to the Premier League - Aston Villa's Ulises De La Cruz, Birmingham's Giovanny Espinoza.

So alien was the idea of a football career that he didn't tell his father when he left home, aged 16, with an offer to play for El Nacional, the military-backed club in Quito, Ecuador's capital city, on a salary of US$50 a month.

"He couldn't see why I shouldn't be with the rest of the family, completing my studies, but I knew I could prove something to him if I got established."

His mother saw the possibilities and his elder brother, Carlos Alfredo, paid the fare for his eight-hour bus journey.

He began life in central midfield, where he sometimes still plays for his nation.

Within a year he found himself playing for Ecuador's under-20s where, alongside Birmingham City's Christian Benitez, he scored 17 goals in 23 matches.

In March 2005 came the full international debut game most Ecuadoreans still remember him for: he scored twice in a 5-2 win over Paraguay as the team came back from 2-0 down.

A move to Europe followed - Villarreal in La Liga - but the Spaniards couldn't make their minds up about him.

He found himself loaned out to Recreativo Huelva in the second division before the 2006 World Cup came around, and the then Wigan manager Paul Jewell, who had tuned in to scout a Polish player on the television, was instead struck by Valencia playing for the opposition.

Jewell flew out to Germany a few days later, saw Valencia play against both Costa Rica and England and hired him, but it was not until Steve Bruce was Wigan's manager that a loan deal became permanent.

Bruce also dismisses those Ronaldo comparisons: "I'd say he is more like my Manchester United team-mate in the early '90s, Andrei Kanchelskis," Bruce says.

"Andrei was quick, strong and able to steam past a defender. Antonio is similar. His stats at Wigan were phenomenal. He ran further than anyone else, worked harder than anyone else and did it all at pace."

Ferguson made no secret of the fact that he wanted more goals from his new recruit.

The seven strikes in a near three-year Wigan career "probably included all the training sessions", Valencia joked recently - but the manager was serious.

"He told me I must concentrate more in training and in matches, that I must try to score goals at every opportunity but also help my team-mates to score," Valencia says.

"So I'm practising all the time. I practise with my team-mates and I like to improve and get better with it. I'm working on that side of my game but there are crosses, tackling back, making the right pass. I hope my all-round contribution is what counts, not just the goals."

The player's general insouciance enabled him to block out the background noise when it took him 12 games to score for United.

"I was always calm and felt no pressure," he insists.

"Even if I hadn't scored a goal up to today, I would still be quite happy. I'm a professional player. Even if I wasn't playing well I would be a professional."

But perhaps it also helped that a childhood growing up in the rainforests made him one of the few prospective players who could not name a United player as a boy.

He admits that the names [Ryan] Giggs and Scholes did not trip off the tongue.

"There was no Premiership transmission when I was a boy and it was the Italian league I watched back then. It was Roma and Francesco Totti. I didn't know anything about United."

United fans awoke to his potential after he found the net twice in four days in October, at home to Bolton and on CSKA Moscow's plastic pitch, with a goal and assist in the 4-0 win at West Ham last Saturday underlining his potential.

"It's different from Wigan because here I have to play two or three times a week," he says.

"Here I have to have greater concentration and be aware that I need to play better on a regular basis."

Valencia's cohorts at the club include Patrice Evra, with whom he can communicate in Spanish, and the Portuguese-speaking contingent of Luis Nani, the Da Silva twins and Anderson, though the impression that he has changed clubs but not lives is reinforced by the fact that his contact with his Latin American friends at Wigan - Maynor Figueroa, Hugo Rodallega and Hendry Thomas - is as great as ever.

"I also watch the Wigan matches," he says with a grin. "Nothing's changed. I'm quite happy, I go to the same restaurants with the same friends."

The one change he cherishes is that Ferguson does not seem quite so struck by his passing resemblance to Michael Jackson as his previous bosses - not least Jewell, who once joked that, if things didn't work out at Wigan, Valencia could always double up as a Jacko lookalike.

"My first, second and third managers told me this but I look at myself in the mirror and honestly can't say I look like Michael Jackson," grins Valencia.

They are the words of a player who considers himself his own man - mi propio hombre, as he calls it - and not a pale imitation of a global superstar.

- INDEPENDENT