Tom Phillips, in Rio de Janeiro, looks at Adriano's journey from the favela to a place in the "magic quartet."

Dona Zora is in no mood for small talk. "Journalists?" she squawks from the second-floor doorway that leads into her cramped, two-bedroom home. "For the love of God, what do you want?"

Here in Vila Cruzeiro, one of Rio de Janeiro's most notorious shantytowns, reporters are about as welcome as head lice. Ruled by heavily armed drug traffickers, the community hit an all-time low in its relations with the press during the 2002 World Cup.

After being caught secretly filming in a nearby favela, one Brazilian reporter was hacked to death with a samurai sword and then burnt in a nearby shallow grave.

Four years on Vila Cruzeiro is back in the headlines. This time, however, the interest is not in cocaine or mutilated journalists but a world-famous footballer, known here simply as pipoca, or popcorn.

This is the old stamping ground of the Internazionale striker Adriano, one component of Brazil's "magic quartet" and widely tipped as a contender for this year's Golden Boot. And Dona Zora, however keen she seems to deny it, is the reluctant owner of his childhood home.

"If you want an interview, I want money," she shouts furiously before, in true Brazilian style, cracking open a cheek-splitting smile and shooing us into her front room. A lonely sticker hangs from the entrance with a greeting: "Someone loves you."

In Vila Cruzeiro "Pipoca" is remembered for two things: his devastating left foot and his shyness. "He's really timid here in the community," says his childhood friend Sandra Vieira, beaming out from the third floor of the sports project she helps run, which towers over Adriano's cramped childhood home. "He talks to us because he's known us since he was a kid, but with people he doesn't know he gets all . . ." She cuts off and shakes her arms up and down, pretending to be nervous.

Vieira praises the stocky forward as an ambassador for their favela.

"We suffered a lot after (the murder of the journalist) Tim Lopes," she says. "In fact, he wasn't killed here, it was over there . . (But) people were sacked from their jobs, lots couldn't get work because they lived here. Society started associating the community with crooks."

Adriano was one of the few who escaped this reality. A visit to his old bedroom, a box-room on the second floor of house Number 19 on road Number 7, in one of around 800 favelas in Rio de Janeiro, underlines the rags-to-riches story of one of Brazil's best-known footballers.

Heave open the room's metal window grate and you stare out on to a pale concrete wall, with a minuscule glimpse of blue sky visible if you arch your neck 90 degrees sideways. A spaghetti-like tangle of electricity cables hovers just above the window sill, siphoning electricity from the city's network into the thousands of red-brick shacks that form the favela.

"Don't mind the mess," Dona Zora chatters, leading us through her immaculately tidy residence and up to the tiled, rooftop veranda from which "Popcorn" used to gaze out over the favela's dusty football pitch, home to his first team, "Hang Football Club".

Founded in 1989 by Adriano's father, Almir Leite Ribeiro, "Hang" lasted 14 years, until its creator's death. Ribeiro never recovered fully after being caught in the skull by a stray bullet and succumbed to a heart attack in 2003.

By this time Adriano's career was at full throttle. While he is not the only mesmerising footballer to have graced the dusty pitch around which Vila Cruzeiro splays out, he is the exception in having made it to the top flight.

"There is a great crop of players inside here, they just need the opportunity to show what they can do," says Bruno Lopes, a former Fluminense player who now trains hordes of potential Adrianos on Vila Cruzeiro's tatty pitch each day.

"Look at this guy," he marvels, following a two-hour training session in suffocating 35C heat. He points to a stocky, nimble-footed teenager, juggling a ball on the back of his neck in front of the nearby goal. Anderson Vinicius, Lopes explains, is mute and deaf, the result of catching meningitis as a child.

"What God took away from him with one hand he gave back with the other," says Lopes, tipping Vinicius as another Vila Cruzeiro player to watch.

Adriano is another who breaks the typical mould of a Brazilian player, though in a different way. Not known for the technical wizardry of Ronaldinho or Robinho, he is nevertheless considered one of the country's most dangerous players; admired for his tenacity and his clinical finishing.

"I always thought he had a lot of potential," says Flavio Pinto, a Rio-based football agent who has worked with Adriano since he played for Brazil's under-17 team. "He was physically strong, had a powerful left foot and above all the desire to win, to be a professional."

Pinto describes the 24-year-old's rise to fame as a whirlwind. Scarcely had he become a professional player when he was sold to Europe to cut his teeth in the Italian league. "Adriano didn't ever really have any time to think about playing for the national team. He got back from playing for the under-20s in the World Cup and - bam! - two months later he'd been sold to Europe.

"Today people are calling him the Imperador (Emperor), but he's got the same good heart, he's never lost any of his simplicity," he adds.

Everyone in Vila Cruzeiro, it seems - even the pistol-clutching drug traffickers who loiter at the favela entrance and perhaps once would have desired a similar path for themselves - has something nice to say about Adriano.

"Good community! Good people!" shout the shantytown's on-duty "foot soldiers" as we make our way out of Adriano's former home, slipping their pistols behind their backs with an embarrassed sleight of hand.

If Adriano notches up even one goal in Germany, the Vila Cruzeiro firework display is likely to be heard all over Rio de Janeiro. And perhaps Dona Zora might permit herself a discreet smile.