NIKE has been peddling the myth of Samba Soccer once again. Where once the boys from Brazil juggled and pirouetted their way through an airport terminal, now we have grainy footage of a pre-pubescent Ronaldinho and his precocious skills, intercut with feints and dribbles performed by the world’s best player as he is now.
Ronaldinho, though, is the exception to the rule. Brazil hasn’t produced a team worthy of its reputation for devil-may-care brilliance since the peak of Zico, Socrates and Eder in 1982. In the run-up to every World Cup, pundits salivate about audacious skills honed on the Copacabana, but it’s a lazy stereotype. Even in their most recent World Cup victories, Brazil achieved success thanks to European-style restraint as much as the explosive skills of lore; Dunga, the prosaic midfielder who held together the 1994 team, is the defining Brazilian player of the last 20 years, not Romario or Ronaldo.
The romantic clichés are undermined further by ruthless cynicism. Rivaldo’s calculated – not to say embarrassingly incompetent – feigning of injury against Turkey in 2002 forever tarnished his reputation. But the gushing pundits find it hard to reconcile cheating and Samba Soccer. In 1994, Kevin Keegan was ITV’s guest pundit for the second-round match between the USA and Brazil. Leonardo, one of Brazil’s most vaunted players, was sent off for swinging an elbow at American midfielder Tab Ramos. Keegan had been hyping the Brazilians the whole game – they eventually ground out a 1-0 win – and spluttered at the injustice; he could not fathom that a Brazilian was capable of a red-card offence. He was made to look even more foolish when Ramos was diagnosed with a fractured cheekbone.
Television coverage of Brazil’s first match at this year’s World Cup, as ever, will be preceded by a montage of swashbuckling dribbles and banana-like free kicks. But it’s discipline and dirty tricks that are just as likely to land them the trophy.