Backlash Toward Brazilian Style Unfair

Soccer does not have a silly season: It operates permanently in a world that borders on the absurd, and it’s never very difficult to come up with recent examples of silliness.Maybe they come from the press. I’m staring at one of those right now, a headline about the poor form of the Spanish club, Valencia, under Ronald Koeman, its new Dutch coach: “Koeman Demands Improvement as Valencia Hit Rock Bottom.” Really?Okay, that’s just plain silly. But there’s another version of silly — what George Orwell called “sillyclever” — that’s not so easy to laugh at. As an example, consider this: It comes from Carlo Ancelotti, the coach of AC Milan. He was busy heaping praise on his Brazilian midfielder, Kaká, who has just been voted the Ballon D’Or (Golden Ball) by the French magazine France Football. The award means, in effect, that a global panel of 96 journalists has judged Kaká to be the best player in the world.“He’s a fabulous player,” Ancelotti said. “It’s an award he deserves.” So far so good — but then Ancelotti is quoted as saying, “Usually Brazilians are circus performers, but he is unusual in this way. In the game he is essential.” Could Ancelotti possibly have said that? On his Milan roster, he has seven other Brazilians, including the great Ronaldo, the all-time leading World Cup goal scorer and a two-time winner of the Ballon D’Or.I find it difficult to believe that Ancelotti would be quite that silly. But what I do not doubt, because I have heard it expressed far too often, is that the image of the Brazilian player as nothing more than a self-indulgent performer of fancy tricks is one that has deep roots, particularly in Europe. What lies at the root of that point of view, it seems to me, is nothing more complicated than jealousy, the wish to find a weakness in the Brazilian game that has won so many more international titles than any other version of soccer.The charge of frivolity is not without some substance. Of course, there are hot-dog Brazilians who overdo the dribbling and the trickery — but not many. Any player who consistently hogs the ball, who repeatedly grandstands when he should be getting on with the game — how long is a player like that going to last at the top level?A good example of a Brazilian player with an abundance of trickery is the 23-year-old Robinho, now with Real Madrid. The coach at Real is the German Bernd Schuster, and we know for sure that last season he did come up with a damagingly silly quote. He was then in charge of Getafe when Barcelona’s Argentine star Lionel Messi scored a superb goal against it after a 60-yard dribble that took him past five defenders. Schuster didn’t call it a circus performance, that’s true, but he made it clear he didn’t like it with his sour “We should have fouled him” comment. Now, Schuster has Robinho on his team, and Robinho, with his dribbles and jinking runs has saved Real on a number of occasions already this season. Maybe Real’s opponents should foul him more? The mindless downplaying of Brazilian-type skills is bound to lead to that sort of contradiction. Any player with outstanding personal skills is viewed with suspicion and is always vulnerable to the accusation that he is not “a team player.” He is likely to be the first scapegoat when a team hits a losing streak.There is a certain type of coach who revels in telling the world that “there are no superstars on my team” — when his team is winning, that is. Unfortunately, the fans have made it clear that they like superstars, that they want to see some razzle-dazzle, and that they like personalities.So, from the duller and less adventurous coaching minds has come the theory that winning soccer and attractive soccer can’t coexist — it has to be one or the other. The theory undergoes a further development with the discovery that winning soccer is manly soccer, a red-blooded physical game, as opposed to attractive soccer, which gets denigrated as “pretty” soccer — obviously something fragile that will be mercilessly crushed when the he-men get at it.The Brazilian example makes a mockery of all this, or at least it always has done. Maybe things are changing, and maybe the game is becoming more physical to the point where Brazil, too, has to adopt a more pragmatic approach. One could argue that this is exactly what Dunga, Brazil’s new coach, is calling for when he talks of having an “effective” style.But there is convincing proof that Brazilian-style soccer is — however grudgingly — accepted as the world standard. Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, recently felt it necessary to warn the world of soccer that it faces a grave danger … of being taken over by Brazilians!“It’s a danger,” he said. “A real, real danger.” Blatter’s point was that many countries are now relaxing their citizenship requirements, meaning that they can recruit good Brazilian players, naturalize them, and have them quickly on the field as part of the national team. “If we don’t take care about the invaders from Brazil, not only toward Europe but toward Asia and Africa,” Blatter continued, “then in the World Cups in 2014 and 2018, out of the 32 teams, we will have 16 full of Brazilian players.”You could class that as yet another silly statement, I suppose, but like Ancelotti’s alleged remark, it hides a vital truth. The two go together and they underline the contradiction I have been discussing. No doubt the “circus performer” slur will continue to be repeated, but surely not many people really believe it. The bigger truth is contained in Blatter’s worry: That Brazilian players are so admired, all over the world, that soccer faces a future of national teams filled with naturalized Brazilians.To some of us, that does not sound like a silly statement. It sounds like a delightful state of affairs.pgardner@nysun.com

Backlash Toward Brazilian Style Unfair

Backlash Toward Brazilian Style Unfair

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