This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2015/mar/27/brazil-france-international-friendly-paris
The article has changed 3 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.
| Version 0 | Version 1 |
|---|---|
| Convalescent Brazil find road to recovery in the capital of France | Convalescent Brazil find road to recovery in the capital of France |
| (about 2 hours later) | |
| Welcome back, then, Brazil. OK, maybe not quite back. Full rehabilitation into something like the Brazil of fond imagination – those tiny-shorted pre-modern maestros, creatures of pure ambling skill – might be asking a bit much. But in Paris on Thursday night a convalescent Brazil were about as impressive as anyone could have reasonably hoped during an unusually intense friendly win at Stade de France. | Welcome back, then, Brazil. OK, maybe not quite back. Full rehabilitation into something like the Brazil of fond imagination – those tiny-shorted pre-modern maestros, creatures of pure ambling skill – might be asking a bit much. But in Paris on Thursday night a convalescent Brazil were about as impressive as anyone could have reasonably hoped during an unusually intense friendly win at Stade de France. |
| It has been nine months since that strangely dreamy World Cup humiliation at the Maracanã, during which Brazil’s seleção have passed from a state of snot-stained emotional collapse to an attitude of curt and manly business as usual. One monolithic Gaucho patriarch has been replaced by a slightly younger monolithic Gaucho patriarch in Dunga, who has at least on the evidence of Paris finally conquered his desire to uncover through painstaking public trial and error the most preposterous combination of tailored blouson plus dandyish open-neck man-shirt currently available to mankind. | |
| Neymar, now the captain, is still the star. On Thursday he was simply a joy to watch, gliding about like some gorgeous otherworldly future-being in whose hands the usual heavy metal of attacking football – working the channels, holding the ball – becomes a kind of frictionless athletic dance. Seven friendly wins down the line, and with a Copa América looming, memories of those guileless World Cup hopes being ripped to pieces by Germany’s champions-elect might just have begun to fade. | |
| Yet with Brazil there will always be a craving for more than just eager competence. Even for those whose loyalties lie elsewhere the state of health of football’s lone continental-scale superpower is a significant matter. In part for emotional reasons. In a certain light, softened by the glow of the green-and-gold half-century, Brazil remain football’s Rolling Stones: glazed and clogged, lavishly co-opted, but somehow with something still wonderfully pure and untempered buried beneath the corporate burnish, the folds of skin. | |
| The real challenge, of course, is to move on from this. And with this in mind if Brazil’s fine showing felt significant it was for reasons more closely connected to how things are right now, a glimpse of a team able to win playing like this Brazil right here and now, un-menaced by the shadow of the wild, wasteful, brilliant superpower of the last century. | The real challenge, of course, is to move on from this. And with this in mind if Brazil’s fine showing felt significant it was for reasons more closely connected to how things are right now, a glimpse of a team able to win playing like this Brazil right here and now, un-menaced by the shadow of the wild, wasteful, brilliant superpower of the last century. |
| For all the talk of a reunion of champions, Brazil v France was instead a meeting of world football’s most prolific supply economics, the twin breadbaskets of Europe. Brazil still lead the way comfortably here, with around 650 Brazilians active in Europe’s top-tier leagues, but together Brazil and France provided almost a third of 160 starting outfield players in this season’s Champions League last-16 ties, with Brazil again top of the table on 27. | For all the talk of a reunion of champions, Brazil v France was instead a meeting of world football’s most prolific supply economics, the twin breadbaskets of Europe. Brazil still lead the way comfortably here, with around 650 Brazilians active in Europe’s top-tier leagues, but together Brazil and France provided almost a third of 160 starting outfield players in this season’s Champions League last-16 ties, with Brazil again top of the table on 27. |
| This is the great achievement of Brazilian football now, the Jogo Bonita long since replaced by the Jogo Prolifica. In its own way its domestic football is a model of global capitalism in action: another bounteous land-rich producer parping out its coffee beans, bio-fuel, muscular attacking midfielders. | This is the great achievement of Brazilian football now, the Jogo Bonita long since replaced by the Jogo Prolifica. In its own way its domestic football is a model of global capitalism in action: another bounteous land-rich producer parping out its coffee beans, bio-fuel, muscular attacking midfielders. |
| And as ever the local ecosystem will change a little in the process. In this case the end result is a dropping away of the old raggedly high-ceilinged talents and a surplus of useful athletic competence as Brazilian coaches, agents and third-party interests concentrate on making individuals rather than teams, safe saleable product rather than reach-for-the-stars creative peaks. Hence Robinho’s recall to the national team aged 31, an attempt to dust with a little old-school invention the current class of willing filler, technically sound athletes moulded to fit wherever they’re needed at the elite European clubs, a kind of high-grade footballing Mastic. | And as ever the local ecosystem will change a little in the process. In this case the end result is a dropping away of the old raggedly high-ceilinged talents and a surplus of useful athletic competence as Brazilian coaches, agents and third-party interests concentrate on making individuals rather than teams, safe saleable product rather than reach-for-the-stars creative peaks. Hence Robinho’s recall to the national team aged 31, an attempt to dust with a little old-school invention the current class of willing filler, technically sound athletes moulded to fit wherever they’re needed at the elite European clubs, a kind of high-grade footballing Mastic. |
| As ever, this process has been driven by economics. At the end of the last century the Bosman ruling was regurgitated in Brazil as something called “Pele’s Law”, enacted while the world’s leading junk-food sandwich ambassador was (amazingly) minister for sport. Designed to free domestic players from restrictive contracts, Pele’s master-plan instead freed up clubs to develop a new intensive farming model based around grooming, marketing and retailing young players to European clubs, a trade that is estimated to have raked in over $1bn to date. | As ever, this process has been driven by economics. At the end of the last century the Bosman ruling was regurgitated in Brazil as something called “Pele’s Law”, enacted while the world’s leading junk-food sandwich ambassador was (amazingly) minister for sport. Designed to free domestic players from restrictive contracts, Pele’s master-plan instead freed up clubs to develop a new intensive farming model based around grooming, marketing and retailing young players to European clubs, a trade that is estimated to have raked in over $1bn to date. |
| The problems for the national team are easy to see. Not just that lack of spike, the old domestic malandro spirt, but also the lack of any emerging Brazilian school of style or tactics. There are almost no prominent Brazilian coaches overseas. No leading Brazilian player – aside from the afterglow of Ronaldinho’s illuminations at Barcelona – has contributed to the tactical revolutions of the last 10 years as Xavi, or Lionel Messi, or Philipp Lahm or Arjen Robben have. Instead Brazil follows close behind, order book in hand. | The problems for the national team are easy to see. Not just that lack of spike, the old domestic malandro spirt, but also the lack of any emerging Brazilian school of style or tactics. There are almost no prominent Brazilian coaches overseas. No leading Brazilian player – aside from the afterglow of Ronaldinho’s illuminations at Barcelona – has contributed to the tactical revolutions of the last 10 years as Xavi, or Lionel Messi, or Philipp Lahm or Arjen Robben have. Instead Brazil follows close behind, order book in hand. |
| Nobody knows why Brazil collapsed so witlessly at the World Cup, but perhaps the conflicting trajectories of new and old, that sense of a transitional sporting identity, might have had something to do with it. A collection of adaptable session singers asked to take centre stage in a country in which many of them had barely played any professional football at all, and found themselves baffled, cut loose, destabilised by a weird, tear-stained all-consuming schmaltz of nostalgic nationalism. | Nobody knows why Brazil collapsed so witlessly at the World Cup, but perhaps the conflicting trajectories of new and old, that sense of a transitional sporting identity, might have had something to do with it. A collection of adaptable session singers asked to take centre stage in a country in which many of them had barely played any professional football at all, and found themselves baffled, cut loose, destabilised by a weird, tear-stained all-consuming schmaltz of nostalgic nationalism. |
| Which is perhaps why Paris, for a Brasil-ophile, felt like a cleansing of the palette. Plenty of ideas have been suggested to fix Brazilian football, from reformed third-party ownership rules to keeping players at home with golden handcuff sponsorship deals. | Which is perhaps why Paris, for a Brasil-ophile, felt like a cleansing of the palette. Plenty of ideas have been suggested to fix Brazilian football, from reformed third-party ownership rules to keeping players at home with golden handcuff sponsorship deals. |
| Perhaps it might be better just to accept that Brazil is now a global concern. In the current squad, 16 of 20 outfield players were playing inassorted corners of Europe before the age of 21. At its best this team can hope to resemble something progressively European: hard-pressing, diligent, athletic. As opposed to the collapsible half-realised impersonation of something grander we saw last summer, a team whose expectations seemed to be set inexorably at David Luiz level – a wonderful talent in the right team, but a player so in love with the possibilities of his own gifts you half expect to look up and notice he’s playing in a top hat, Charlestoning over the halfway line, heading always for some grand Gatsbyish collapse. | |
| Brazilians haven’t generally expected much from Dunga as manager. But perhaps his greatest gift might be simply to allow this new generation of itinerants, these post-Brazilians, to find an identity that fits. | Brazilians haven’t generally expected much from Dunga as manager. But perhaps his greatest gift might be simply to allow this new generation of itinerants, these post-Brazilians, to find an identity that fits. |