This past Monday it was
revealed that Europol – not purveyors of brooding, angular indie
rock, but rather European Union law enforcers par excellence –
have been picking through the rotten bones of over six hundred
professional football matches across the globe whose outcomes, it is
believed, were fixed. The headline domestically is that a Champions
League game played on these shores in “the last three or four
years” is among them, as well as several World Cup and European
Championship qualifiers and a selection of top-flight European league
fixtures. Depressing reading for anyone hoping that high
profile, top
flight match-fixing cases of recent years were behind us, as the
depth and breadth of these revelations appear to reveal a systematic,
structured and skilled web of financial misdeeds. “It would be
naïve and complacent of those in the UK to think such a criminal
conspiracy does not involve the English game”, stated Europol
director Rob Wainwright with all the warmth and compassion of a
stairwell kneecapping. Not that I'm blaming him – he's only doing
his job, and right now it's one nobody amongst us envies in the
slightest.
What we really need in
such a dark moment is something to cheer us up, and so before
football takes itself out to the garage one final time with a draft
excluder and a length of hose, we should remember that this Wednesday
sees one of those rare occasions which one feels should embody
everything that is pure and good about football. That's right, it's
England versus Brazil and breathe, because everything will be OK. Or
will it?
For as long as I've
been aware of the sport's very existence, Brazil have been football's
omnipotent deity. Fire up any football console game from the
early-to-mid nineties and the best team was always Brazil, despite
being in the midst of a real-life slump. Much like Real Madrid when
it comes to the European Cup, Brazil have only topped up their trophy
haul in the fairly recent past, but even when times were tough their
reputation remained intact, their status as football's glorious
overlords undiminished with the passing years. The likes of Germany,
Italy and Argentina may have conquered the world in the meantime,
producing players of inscrutable genius along the way, but they never
quite usurped Brazil from it's throne.
Like Australia with
cricket or America with all those sports the rest of the world only
pretends to care about, Brazil remains to this day global
shorthand for footballing superiority. Ask the first stranger you
meet who claims to neither know nor care about football, and they
will still be able to tell you two things – that all footballers
are preening, overpaid man-children, and that Brazil are the best in
the world. Even when they aren't the best, they sort of still are, if
you see what I mean. At times it feels almost de rigueur to
wax lyrical about Brazilians.
All of which brings me to
a terrible dark secret I'd like to share, which is that when it comes
to Brazil I've always been left with a sense of, if not
disappointment, then certainly anticlimax. Despite winning more World
Cups in my lifetime than anyone else, I can't shake the sensation
that the reality of contemporary Brazilian national teams falls some
way short of what I expect them to be. I'm keen to turn this
situation around, but to do so I should really go back to the start,
so allow me if you will to indulge in some personal footballing
therapy. I won't be charging for the session.
The summer of 1994 was
my first real experience of Brazil as a footballing powerhouse,
emerging from the thermometer-bursting heat of USA '94 triumphant
thanks to a team favouring function over fireworks, constructed
around the pragmatic but hardly mouth-watering defensive ideology of
coach Carlos Alberto Parreira. Chief schemer Rai began the tournament
as captain, but after scoring in their opening game, his prominence
in proceedings drifted, finishing the tournament as an unused
substitute having played only bit-part roles during the knock-out
stages. In his absence the midfield remained a largely flair-less
affair, dominated by Dunga and Mauro Silva, fine practitioners of
their chosen fields, accomplished disruptors and constructors, but
hardly names to set my youthful heart a-flutter. It was the front two
that really got people talking – in a time of celebrated strike
partnerships the pairing of Romario and Bebeto stood out as a sort of
exotic Shearer and Sutton, replacing knock-downs with one-twos and
basic hands-aloft celebrations with tightly choreographed post-goal
paeans to newborn
future-heroes. But that wasn't enough for me. That summer I fell
in love with Baggio, Stoichkov and Hagi but not with Brazil.
1998 was much the same,
although the attacking talent was far superior. Boasting Rivaldo's
merciless bow-legged conjury, Roberto Carlos' thunderous tree-thighed
wing charges, and of course the mercurial goal snaffling of the
Original Ronaldo, this side had the tools and the talent but
something never quite clicked for me. Their play felt intrinsically
mechanical; a modern day blockbuster reboot of a cult classic, a
strangely sexless scene-for-screen remake of something glorious and
hallowed and lost. As a fourteen year old I remember racing home from
school to catch Brazil in the opening game of France 98: a classic
David & Goliath face-off between 'plucky' Scotland and these
quick-limbed alien maestros. I've always found myself cheering for
the underdog, but even as I leapt with delight as John Collins
stroked home his equalising penalty, something deep within me still
yearned for this Brazil team to ignite, to ascend to the footballing
heavens in a blaze of warm light and dazzling step-overs, to hand out
a lesson of pure sporting brilliance so epoch-defining it would echo
through the deserted hallways of time long after I hoped off this
mortal coil. Scotland's eventual undoing was a Tom Boyd own goal.
With the greatest of respect, it was tangibly unsatisfying to see
Ronaldo, Rivaldo et al put manfully in their place by Colin
Calderwood and Darren Jackson.
In fairness they hit
their stride eventually, but having reached their second consecutive
final, it all went a bit wonky in Paris. Something murky and unpretty
– something distinctly chaotic and abrasive – unstitched the
mental fabric of that side on the eve of their big moment, allowing a
Zidane-inspired French team who had steadily been gaining traction
over the tournament's course to steamroller their way to victory,
elating the natives and ushering in the modern era of muscular,
all-action football-athletes: the age of Vieira and Henry, the
remorseless, custom-built supermachines that have strode before us
from that day forth. Four years later Brazil would emerge victorious
in Yokohama, dually aided by the loose-limbed elastic impudence of
Ronaldinho and the holder's mental implosion, but since then they
haven't got further than the quarter-finals. Now ranked 18th in the
world (behind Switzerland, Ecuador and Greece), even by Fifa's dodgy
arithmetic they're struggling to be heard above the din.
I'm doing my best to
not sell recent Brazil sides short, for they have produced some fine
performances and a host of marvellously talented individuals. And yet
it is the images I'd seen of Brazil sides of yore – the scratchy
newsreel footage of Pele, Jairzinho and Carlos Alberto weaving
hitherto unknown patterns; finding new angles of attack, coining
fresh, elaborate entries in football's ballooning lexicon seemingly
on the hoof – which left the young football fantasist in me feeling
left out, like I'd turned up late for a great party. Despite the
victories, despite the physics-defying set-pieces (this
one, not this
one), something felt amiss. Try as I did to move past it, the
fact remained: this was not the Brazil I had been promised.
Bless us, we try our
hardest to reignite that awe-struck spirit, but it always feels like
we're faking it a bit, giving off a vaguely unpalatable sense of
trying to reanimate a dead legend. Tournaments, clean-shirted studio
anchors inform us, only really begin “tomorrow, when the Brazilians
come to town”. We expect a trouncing; an exhibition of ancient
ball-magic by a band of beatific pint-sized soccer nymphs. When they
do arrive – not via hoverboard or spaceship or unicorn, but rather
the humble coach – what we get is a rather limp, beige 2-0 victory,
courtesy of a penalty and a header following an admittedly
well-rehearsed corner routine (probably). Not that this will
discourage us, for the action will inevitably be soundtracked by
lustful commentary box gasps of “samba time!” as Gilberto Silva
completes a routine five yard pass. It all feels a little like a
faint-headed hen crowd chucking underwear at a Take That tribute
act, the unsaid truth being that maybe we are trying a bit too hard
to recapture something that just isn't there any more.
Or maybe I'm being a
bit harsh. The very same criticisms I've aimed here could hold
equally true of both Holland and Argentina, nations which produced
great sides of yesteryear but who – despite the presence of some
exceptionally gifted players (think Batistuta and Messi, Bergkamp and
Sneijder) – have yet to produce a side to define the current era.
Perhaps, tempting though it is, ages and generations shouldn't be
compared, because the contrasts will somehow always show through
clearer than the similarities, a state of affairs that can only,
inescapably lead to dissatisfaction.
I hope I don't sound
ungrateful or spoiled saying all this, because despite everything
when I settle down to watch Brazil take to the field it's always with
wide eyes and a butterfly stomach. When I pull up a pew my intention
is still to worship and, as mentioned earlier, football has bigger
things to worry about than living up to my dizzy expectations. So
tomorrow I plan to enjoy a Brazilian side preparing to host it's
first World Cup in more than six decades, and I'll look on with that
same anxious hope I always have, perhaps even comforted somehow by
two things: the knowledge that the reality of what I'll be watching
may never quite match up with the legend, and the acceptance that
maybe that's the point of legends in the first place. Let's just hope
no-one knows the score already.
