Neymar - lucky boy
Except that’s not how many fans will see things today. Instead the
talk will be of a dive, debatable refereeing and whether Brazil are a bit rubbish
but FIFA will see them right because the alternative doesn’t bear thinking
about.
It’s strange that the backlash should be so strong – opening games of World Cups are often turgid affairs, and this one had incident, goals and was a genuine contest between teams who for periods looked to take each other on rather than spar and wait for easier assignments. In 1998, a far more strongly fancied Brazil struggled to beat Scotland.
But then this is Brazil we’re talking about – a team whom neutrals feel obliged to be dazzled by or feel let down. A slightly cynical group stage victory over tough but less storied opposition by the Germans, Italians or Argentinians (despite their talents) brings grudging admiration – its ‘typical’ of them. By Brazil it’s viewed as a form of sacrilege.
The brilliance of Brazil's unsuccessful 1982 team
Brazilian football fans almost certainly take a different view – understandable given the trauma of watching the 1982 team go from a seemingly indomitable force to a key component in the World Cup ‘if only’ industry. More recently the 2006 team looked to field a ‘Magic Square’ of the world’s most talented attacking players, only to look listless and run into Zinedine Zidane.
But surely Brazil not quite living up to their billing deserved little more than an exhalation of disappointment and the shuffling of a few fingers rearranging Betfair accounts? Instead it got anger, disappointment and in some wildly disproportionate cases outrage, with Twitter awash and ludicrous declarations that people would be supporting ‘anyone but Brazil' after last night’s game.
Fred dropping as if dead for Brazil’s vital penalty was unedifying and a poor piece of refereeing, Neymar could have seen red – but if he had then the referee would’ve been accused of spoiling the game. Home and big teams getting marginal decisions is hardly a shock in football, with a number of papers showing how refs are influenced by partisan crowds. The World Cup is littered with cases of questionable decisions going in favour of the hosts or its more storied nations, most famously in recent times facilitating South Korea’s extraordinary run to the Semis in 2002 –that's not to mention Azerbaijani linesmen, 1966 and all that.
Part of that backlash is the universal rule of social networks magnifying idiocy, but there is something deeper in at least the lack of enthusiasm for a Brazil victory outside the host country– despite the fact that it would make the tournament into a footballing party we’ve never seen the like of before.
That anger or at best lack of enthusiasm, for this might come from a different place than fans discovering their often absent sense of aesthetic ideals or exacting sense of fair play. Instead it may be a result of this Brazil side’s conflicting roles as front men for something rather less beautiful than the country’s footballing history and culture.
Brazil's victorious 1994 team
I remember during the first World Cup I watched in 1994 their seemed a moral duty to support Brazil. They hadn’t won since 1970, with the previous ones being won by the unromantic Germans, the streaky Italians (who’d stopped Brazil’s wonderous 1982 team despite not winning a game in the first phase) and the cynical if talented Argentinians. Despite Dunga’s side not being particularly committed to the ideals of ‘Joga Bonito’ there was a sense that after the dark side had been defeated and football was back in the hands of its moral custodians.
By 1998 Brazil had far more fantasy players, but that sense of organic joy was now a marketing tool. Rather than celebrating the sheer joy of Ronaldo in full flow for its own sake we had to buy the Nike gear and listen to endless lazy media droning about their virtues. They were in short, just another (very good) football team with jazzier marketing.
In 2014 the Seleção are not just a collection of talented players representing a fascinating nation but the conflicted nature of this World Cup in concentrate. While a part of us wants to see Rio in full carnival mode as Neymar sashays through defences, another part sees this as what FIFA and its sponsors want us to think - a position unwittingly and shamefully articulated by Pele when he said in ITV’s build-up program that protestors would pipe-down once Brazil began winning.
If you define a good course of action by doing the opposite of whatever pseudo-rap abomination Pitbull does then seeing him defile the storied golden shirt in the opening ceremony was a stark reminder that this World Cup's Brazilian flavour also comes served with a dollop of homogonised crap. For Brazilian protestors the presence of an emaciated Vin Diesel lookalike is the least of their worries, with the World Cup circus' demands of a poor and unequal country symbolising just how cut off the competition is from the reality of the culture it is supposed to 'celebrate' (read use on marketing material).
That reluctance to be charitable to Brazil when they understandably don’t thrill as much as expected, or adopt them as a second team perhaps tells us less about their merits and more about the fact that even a win will not live up to the past's lofty ideals. They will no doubt thrill us at times, but we'll be unable to view them with quite the same wide-eyed innocence and joy that we did them, and football in the past.
