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It’s a new era we’re living in, one in which the Brazilian national football team is nothing special; just one of many decent sides.
Brazil lost 1-0 to Colombia in the 2015 Copa America this week, the championship for South American national teams.
Brazil’s one star player Neymar lost his cool as the final whistle confirmed the loss, thumped the ball into a Colombian player, had a spat with another, and received a post-match red card.
For the second tournament in a year he’ll (temporarily) be unavailable to help a team that heavily needs him.
It’s a post-apocalyptic world for Brazil these days. The nuclear explosion went off on July 8, 2014, when Brazil lost 7-1 to Germany at the 2014 World Cup. Now, like grim survivors emerging haltingly from rubble, the Brazilian team are prodding their surroundings and cautiously examining what can be put together out of the ruins of a once great civilisation.
For the moment, it hasn’t yet been much. Neymar’s goal and slide-rule assist gave them a shaky 2-1 win over Peru, one of South America’s weakest teams. Then came the loss to Colombia, who are emerging as a pretty team with hot players operating to a central idea of what a Colombian team represents.
Brazil now have none of those features. They do not attack well, besides Neymar they do not contain ‘name’ players, and incessant fouls while defending means they haven’t qualified as pretty for a long time.
It boggles that a country of 200 million people all devoted to the sport could be in such a generational rut. But Brazil’s downfall shows that small details add up until they overwhelm the whole. Off the field, Brazil’s long-term planning and vision have been non-existent. They assumed they would always produce stars, and those stars would always win them titles.
The chickens of Brazilian complacency all came home to roost at once against Germany last year. But Brazil have in reality been hot and cold ever since the new millennium began, interspersing the occasional tournament-winning year with other years of mediocrity.
The end of Circus Brazil anecdotally coincided with the partying decline of Ronaldinho in 2006. The cache of forwards from the previous generation all became old or prematurely washed up at once: Ronaldo, Adriano, Ronaldinho and to a lesser extent Kaka all fell from the tree, to be replaced by Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo at an individual level and Spain and Germany as collective evolutionary ideas at football’s apex.
The last consistently good Brazil team was at the 2010 World Cup, when Kaka, Robinho and striker Luis Fabiano provided the last sparks of old, ball-loving Brazil. Those three were immediately phased out upon losing that tournament and since then Brazil have seemingly not understood who their best eleven players are at any stage over the last five years. They also succumbed to odd and unprecedented crises of confidence leading up to them exiting both the 2010 and 2014 World Cups.
The exception was when their 2013 team gelled in the practice FIFA Confederations Cup tournament. These five splendid wins, however, made Brazil a closed shop of players who all individually lost form over the next year leading into World Cup 2014. As a result, Fred, Hulk, Oscar, Fernandinho, David Luiz, Bernard, Maicon, Dante, Marcelo and goalkeeper Julio Cesar were all terrible.
Yet the lèse-majesté mentality endures among Brazilians – thou shalt not criticise the king. Defender Dante talked about the ribbing he receives from German club teammates over the 7-1 and announced self-importantly, “You can joke about anything – but not that”.
There is an aversion to admitting problems. Current manager Dunga blamed Colombia for provoking Neymar yesterday. He said: “Brazil can’t go to war, Brazil have to play football.”
A laughable untruth. Guardian columnist Jonathan Wilson countered succinctly with, “This is the same arrogance, the same refusal to accept that others are allowed to try to stop them, that undermined Brazil last year; it is the self-delusion of a nation that harks back to past glories and blames opponents for its failure to live up to them.”
Brazil must now play game number three against Venezuela, kind of an elimination game (but not really), without Neymar, the only player who has produced any of Brazil’s goalscoring chances this tournament. They may also be without him for a prospective quarter-final.
Grim times for Brazil, but that’s just the new normal now.
Marty Gleason has reviewed each football season from 1998 to 2014 at martygleason.wordpress.com.
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