Star's heavenly support

The last words that Robson Leung Ka-hai's Brazilian grandmother said to him before she died still fill his mind. 'Are you grown up enough to meet life's challenges?'

The 18-year-old Hongkonger, whose mother is Brazilian and his father Chinese, is too young to give a definitive answer, but well on the way to achieving his dream - of being a successful professional footballer.

'Grandma told me she was proud of me becoming a professional footballer in Hong Kong,' Robson says. 'I am still motivated by her now; I believe she is watching me play from heaven. I pray before games and ask for her support.'

Her battling spirit taught the winger to strive for success. 'Grandma was very ill, but also tough,' he says. 'She stayed alive - waiting in bed until I visited Brazil on holiday last summer. She asked me that question - if I was grown up enough - just before I went to the airport to fly to Hong Kong. She died the next day. I'll never know how much pain she suffered in order to grab my hands and ask me that in person.'

When Robson first came to Hong Kong, aged nine, he spoke no Cantonese or English. He started at school in Primary One the next year and Hong Kong club Kitchee recruited him to train alongside their young players after seeing him playing football. 'I knew I was starting late at school, so put in extra effort,' he says. 'I knew nothing about my subjects. In Brazil, I'd never learned Chinese, mathematics or English.'

Robson did so well at school he moved up to study in Primary Three the next year.

At 15, Kitchee registered him to play in the First Division in preparation for the Asian Football Confederation in 2008. Playing away to Dongguan Lanwa, in Dongguan, Guangdong, Robson - then a defender - was stunned when Kitchee's coach called him from the substitutes' bench and told him he was playing. 'I didn't know he was going to put me on,' Robson says, who set a new record as the youngest player to play in a First Division match at the time.