I have rarely seen a Brazilian team so weak – 10/14/2023 – Tostão

I have rarely seen a Brazilian team so weak, collectively confused. Brazil’s only offensive strategy in the 1-1 draw with Venezuela consisted of congesting the left side with two wingers and the midfield delivering the ball to Neymar. He moved too far back to receive it, sometimes he made a beautiful individual play without completing it and other times he lost the ball or missed the pass.

Brazil cannot depend on so many individual moves from Neymar. The collective game has to give him the conditions to shine, from the opponent’s midfield to the goal. Neymar is not a midfielder. He is an attacking midfielder.

Vinicius Junior ran out of space with so many players close to him. At Real Madrid, the team’s main move is to turn the ball quickly to the left, for Vinicius to receive it and dribble past the marker, which did not happen against Venezuela.

Every now and then the team will put on an individual show, score goals, receive lots of praise, create huge expectations, and then fail against strong opponents, as in the eliminations in the last World Cups.

Thinking that Fernando Diniz is the ideal coach to recover the origins, the art football of the 60s, is a simplistic and outdated view. The team needs to play modern football. Diniz, at Fluminense and other teams, stood out with a game of approaches, exchanges of passes, control of the ball, virtues of the main teams in the world.

The crowding of players in the same space with two wingers on the left, at all times and against all opponents, is a negative factor among Fernando Diniz’s good ideas. It works well only in some special situations.

On Tuesday, against Uruguay, it will be another day, a new story. Who knows, maybe Brazil will have a great match against the renewed Uruguayan team, led by Loco Bielsa.

Brazil’s collective performance was so bad, frightening, that I missed the team organized under Tite’s command, and also the titês, the verb “opportunize”, the “disconcerting extremes”, as Tite called the skillful, fast and dribbling wingers .

Tite is Flamengo’s new coach. He is characterized by professional seriousness, pragmatism, scientific knowledge and the respectful way in which he treats everyone, journalists, referees and assistants, without agitation or hysterics during matches.

Perhaps Tite and several other coaches who are passionate about strategy and planning lack the ability, in the face of the unexpected, to quickly make different decisions that have not been rehearsed. This is for very few.

Tite must still dream about De Bruyne, from Belgium, and Modric, from Croatia, two decisive and unexpected factors that were important in Brazil’s eliminations in the last two World Cups.

Coaches like Fernando Diniz, Tite, Ancelotti, Abel Ferreira and others are important, but people shouldn’t create unrealistic expectations.

One hundred years

A few days ago, the writer, journalist and chronicler Fernando Sabino would have turned one hundred years old. I am proud to have been interviewed by him at the hotel in Rio de Janeiro where the 1970 World Cup winning team stayed for a day immediately after arriving from Mexico. On this occasion, Fernando Sabino had already written “Encontro Marcado”, one of the most impactful books I have read. The interview was the subject of one of his chronicles. Fernando Sabino’s many books humanized my soul. They are mixtures of irony, beauty, philosophy and existential anguish.

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