Soccer in Sun and Shadow

The Fiesta

There are towns and villages in Brazil that have no church, but not a one lacks a soccer field. Sunday is the day of hard labor for cardiologists all over the country. On a normal Sunday people die of excitement during the mass of the ball. On a Sunday without soccer, people die of boredom.

When the Brazilian national team met disaster at the ’66 World Cup, there were suicides, nervous breakdowns, flags at half-staff, and black ribbons on doors. A procession of dancing mourners filled the streets to bury the country’s soccer prowess in a coffin. Four years later, Brazil won the world championship for the third time and Nelson Rodrigues wrote that Brazilians were no longer afraid of being carried off by the dogcatcher, they were all ermine-caped kings in pointy crowns.

At the World Cup in 1970, Brazil played a soccer worthy of her people’s yearning for celebration and craving for beauty. The whole world was suffering from the mediocrity of defensive soccer, which had the entire side hanging back to maintain the catenaccio while one or two men played by themselves up front. Risk and creative spontaneity were not allowed. Brazil, however, was astonishing: a team on the attack, playing with four strikers — Jairzinho, Tostão, Pelé and Rivelino — sometimes increased to five and even six when Gérson and Carlos Alberto came up from the back. That steamroller pulverized Italy in the final.

A quarter of a century later, such audacity would be considered suicide. At the ’94 World Cup, Brazil won another final against Italy, this time decided in a penalty shootout after 120 minutes without a single goal. If it had not been for the penalty shots, the nets would have remained untouched for all eternity.