Monday 28 June 2010

Brazil have already won this World Cup

Long, long ago, Brazil used to represent fantasy football. Now - everywere but in the minds of commentators, still clogged with mouldering images of 1970 - Brazil are international football's equivalent of the reality principle. Their victories are as inevitable as they are joyless, pulverising not only their opponents but any sense of drama and romance like flowers under the wheels of a tank. This is not a team that has tempered flair with organisation; it is a team whose success is entirely almost based on athleticism and positional discipline. There was a suffocating flatness about Brazil's destruction of Chile tonight; it was if Brazil's remorselessy effective defence - by some distance the most miserly in the competition, protected by a steely shield of two holding midfielders - had drawn the very oxygen from the air.
Brazil are the Terminator of the World Cup. "There is no fate," was the slogan of the latest Terminator film, but Brazil's success in this World Cup seems fated, the script written by their corporate sponsors, Nike, with teams like Chile tonight reduced to the role of background drones in the tediously slick CGI-driven commercials. It feels like Brazil have already won the World Cup, and that anything else will be a triumph for surprise over grim inevitability. That inevitability feels even more fated when you remember that no European teams have won outside Europe, and that Brazil have won all but two of the tournaments held outside Europe since 1958, including both of the tournaments that were hosted outside Europe and South America. Who, if anyone, can stop the inevitable from happening, and restore some sense of surprise and romance to the World Cup?

18 comments:

  1. "Who, if anyone, can stop the inevitable from happening, and restore some sense of surprise and romance to the World Cup?"

    Our hydrid human-machine saviour...Argentina!
    Also, Brazil will clash with Uruguay in the semis...and any brazilian can say they fear Uruguay a lot more than Argentina. History sometimes works better than any 5-star schrink

    JL

    ReplyDelete
  2. Amazing... the Swedish tele has made a melange with today's highlights and the soundtrack was ... Radiohead's No Alarms No Surprises!

    How proper can it reflect this boring World Cup day?


    JL

    ReplyDelete
  3. As you've probably gathered, I'm completely on board with this.

    'Chile tonight reduced to the role of background drones' - that impression was heightened by Chile turning out in their anonymous all-white away kit. Like the local minor league team invited to play against the Globetrotters.

    What continues to mystify me is how Brazil are still generally regarded as 'everyone's second team' and 'the romantic's favourites'.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I'm not sure how having a dominant european team succeed in an area brutalized by colonization is a good thing, & maybe this is the downside to the 'romance' you bring up - that you'd have to be from the peninsulas & islands called 'continental' to feel it, but I still think that Germany & Spain will have strong showings. & don't forget Argentina, the shaggy hair popular with some on that team has not slowed them down at all. Even a sort of odd contender like Uruguay - with the athletic defense that pundits have been calling 'ugly' (why?) could hold out against Brazil. (I'd also vote for Japan as a possible dark horse, if only because they've never relied on the long game, and the new ball has been stifling that kind of play for most teams) - tho, admittedly, 2 of the four teams I've mentioned are also Nike picks, but so was England, and that was no inevitability at all (if I'm remembering correctly, holland was another background team, losing affectlessly to spain, and US was the comic relief. Also so in capitalist realism? a global comedy of errors?). I do see the hopelessness you bring up, but it seems exaggerated (I hope, but doubt, that this is true of capitalism itself) - in this cup, I think Brazil would be right where they're playing in 3rd place again.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I fail to understand why anyone can't enjoy Brazil beating the crap out of all comers. Brazil is a beautiful nation of lovely mestizo people, with genius music and art. And they play football incredibly well. I could never root for the Yankees, Manchester United, or the Lakers, but I have no problem rooting for Brazil, whether their joga is benito or otherwise.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I would love Argentina to beat them precisely because I used to love the old Brazil so much. Under the coaching of Dunga and Maradona it's as if each of the respective teams from 78 and 82 had traded places. And you probably have to pick Brazil based on organisation and brute strength, but I know whom I'm going to support if they both go all the way.

    For those who might have missed this recent Guardian interview with Socrates, interesting thoughts on Dunga and the politics of footballing style from the great man.

    ReplyDelete
  7. (At the cost of spoiling his upcoming novel, it's set in Brazil at the next world cup and Argentina beats Brazil in the final with two goals by Messi. Tells you where his allegiances lie...)

    ReplyDelete
  8. Interesting that you mention the Yankees and United, Eric. New York and Manchester are both great old cities with lots of attractive aspects - but in both cases the bloated sporting juggernauts who allegedly represent them have achieved total disconnection from their roots in those cities.

    Once upon a time, the Brazil team were a continuation of the Brazilian people. I don't think that's the case anymore. Their footballers are megabucks cosseted-from-age-7 bubble-dwellers like any other top nation's.

    I think you can too carried away with 'team of representative of nation', anyway. In football (and seemingly only in football) you get these unexpected reversals, where the USA are these appealingly gutsy underdogs and Brazil are, well...

    ReplyDelete
  9. Actually, I'm pretty sure it happens in lots and lots of sports. Sri Lanka has been a cricket powerhouse, New Zealand does really well in rugby and (of all things) softball - and so forth.

    ReplyDelete
  10. The Brazil - Inter comparisons are looking increasing poignant.

    ReplyDelete
  11. True, Giovanni. Not sure what I was thinking of there. The same principle works in other sports too.

    But football still stands apart from the next most popular global sport, athletics. The WC, unlike the Olympics, doesn't have China, Russia, and the US taking turns in the top three every time.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Ah, but even in athletics Jamaica currently has a stranglehold on the most prized event. And China has never had sprinters. When you break it down into disciplines just about anybody can be an underdog.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Points well made, but if we're talking about *romance*, I don't think an emerging Chinese sprinter racing against Bolt, Powell, and co would really feel like an underdog. You can never fully isolate each discipline - the context of each nation's overall standing does still apply.

    ReplyDelete
  14. 'The taxonomy of the underdog' is probably a post for another time, though...

    ReplyDelete
  15. It's fascinating to me because in some respects it operates like those niche industries they have in some parts of the world, where they make incredibly specialised components for machinery that they never see in use - the Veneto region is like that. And so too there are regions that know how to engineer humans according to certain sporting specifications.

    You're right, it's a discussion for another day, yet it's not entirely irrelevant to Mark's analysis of the transformation of Brazil into the machine that is today.

    ReplyDelete
  16. "Who, if anyone, can stop the inevitable from happening, and restore some sense of surprise and romance to the World Cup?"

    Rage Against The Machine?

    ReplyDelete
  17. Uruguay and/or Maradona!

    ReplyDelete