Brazil World Cup Blog

I need more time to write my postmortem on Brazil’s World Cup campaign, and the previous thread has almost 3000 comments on it, so here’s a new thread in the meantime.

We’ll see what comes of the final. On the one hand, I think Spain are the better team on paper, Argentina have shown themselves to be vulnerable against the sort of patient buildup play they can produce, and I think the Spanish game plan is so well-established and ingrained in their players that it’s highly unlikely they’d fuck things up by abandoning it like England just did. On the other hand, you can’t ever count on Spain’s scorers to turn their general dominance of a game into actual goals, and Argentina have repeatedly shown that they’ll refuse to quit and can dramatically turn up the intensity when chasing games. (Then there’s the whole “the refs seem to give their players the benefit of the doubt and turn a microscope on their opponents” thing.) As much as I’d love to see Argentina suffer a 7-1 of their own, I think they’re too good and too mentally tough for that, and Spain are too respectful to really run up the score should they get the chance.

I’d say perhaps it’s time to root for Team Meteor, but I live close enough to the stadium that that’s probably not advisable. So I might as well preemptively congratulate Argentina for pulling a win out of their asses in the dying minutes, and just hope that meeting Donald Trump during the trophy ceremony gets his sports curse all over them so we can blow them out of the water in 2030.

Well, I correctly predicted the score of the Japan game, though I don’t think it was right to say it “[wouldn’t] feel quite as close as the scoreline suggests”. While Brazil undeniably controlled the game, we didn’t turn our dominance into much in the way of clear opportunities, and Japan took the lead off, well, very much the same kind of goal that has doomed the Seleção at recent World Cups. At one point early in the second half, Casemiro had a point-blank header that ricocheted off three Japanese defenders without ever crossing the line or falling to a Brazilian to tap the ball home, and I couldn’t help but think, that’s the sort of lucky break a team gets when they’re fated to win. But just a few minutes later, Casemiro popped up in the box again and this time buried his header, and after some more huffing and puffing, Gabriel Martinelli silenced his doubters (me) with the game-winning goal in the fifth minute of stoppage time.

I do have a few complaints to make, mostly about how this victory felt more labored than it probably should. But let me start with the more positive spin. Brazil hasn’t won a hard-fought, come-from-behind game like this one at the World Cup in forever. In fact, the last time Brazil fell behind and still won in the knockout rounds at the World Cup was in the 2002 quarterfinals against England. That 24-year gap is the longest between such comebacks in the team’s history. And it’s not like Brazil had better outcomes in lesser tournaments. Across all the tournaments the senior and Olympic teams have played since then, I found only three such comebacks in the knockout rounds:

– With the last kick of the 2004 Copa América final against Argentina, Adriano scored arguably the most clutch goal in Seleção history to tie the game at 2-2 and send it to penalties, where Brazil won. This is also one of only a handful of times where we scored a game-changing goal in second-half stoppage time, and the only one in the knockout rounds. (Philippe Coutinho against Costa Rica at the 2018 World Cup and Casemiro against Colombia at the 2021 Copa América also come to mind.)

– In the 2009 Confederations Cup final, we spotted the USA a 2-0 lead at the half before coming back to win 3-2.

– In our 2012 Olympic quarterfinal, Honduras twice took the lead, although we completed the comeback by the 60th minute and won 3-2.

I didn’t keep a close count, but it seemed far more common for these sorts of close games to emerge because Brazil scored first and then conceded a tying goal before retaking the lead (see also: Brazil 3-2 Netherlands, 1994) or collapsing (see also: Brazil 1-2 Netherlands, 2010). A team like Brazil obviously doesn’t fall behind in games all that often, but they’ve rarely been able to demonstrate poder do reação—power to react—like they had to do on Monday.

Because, remember: we can argue that the performance was poor in several ways, but when it came down to it, faced with the exact situation—conceding a goal(s) partly because Casemiro (or his replacement) couldn’t make a crucial stop in midfield and Alisson didn’t really do anything wrong but it just feels like maybe he needs to be saving those chances if we want to win a tournament like this, does it?—that led to our exit from the past two World Cups, this time we had the poder do reação to turn things around and advance.

Still, a few words on things that bothered me or that I otherwise found interesting.

In the end, if Brazil’s 3-0 win over Scotland on Wednesday wasn’t spectacular, it was certainly the most comfortable a Brazil win has felt in a while. We pounced on a few catastrophic Scottish mistakes, controlled the game well enough that Scotland had barely had a chance by the time we put the game to bed, and held off their belated revival well enough to secure a second consecutive clean sheet. Neymar even got to make his long-awaited return and didn’t totally look like a husk of his former self! What more could we really have asked for besides some slightly better finishing, or maybe some slightly more favorable refereeing?

Thus ends our group stage, and we now enter the second of what, with this expanded tournament format, feels more than ever like three distinct phases. We had our three group games, in which we only had to do well enough; now come three knockout games which we must all win if we want the final two-game phase that comes guaranteed with reaching the semifinal. This is the most perilous part of the tournament, for the obvious reason of there being no second chances, no third-place game to fall back on, and also because, even if we can take a sober look at this team and say that it has some profound flaws that will make winning this World Cup extremely unlikely, Brazil losing before the quarterfinals under any circumstance will feel like a disaster, and losing in the quarterfinals might still feel like we’ve barely made any progress despite the very expensive hire of Carlo Ancelotti.

Still, things do feel like they’re starting to come together. The team looks more confident with every game. Vini Júnior has been flying slightly under the radar compared to the Messis and Mbappés of the world, but he’s having a stellar tournament, with four goals already and a hand in two others. He joins Ronaldo, Rivaldo (both 2002), Romário (1994) and Jairzinho (1970) as the only Brazilians to score in all three group stage games, and if you believe in these sorts of portents, well, every other time it’s happened we went on to win the whole tournament. Alongside him, Matheus Cunha has already quadrupled his pre-World Cup goal total for Brazil—easy enough to do when you only had one, but he’s certainly picked a fine time to find his scoring boots. Post-2002, every Brazil number 9 has either scored zero (Fred 2014, Gabriel Jesus 2018) or three (Ronaldo 2006, Luís Fabiano 2010, Richarlison 2022) goals. Cunha has allayed my fears that he’d be stuck on the former number; let’s see if he can now surpass the latter number too.

Beyond them, Bruno Guimarães has quietly had a stellar tournament too, with three assists and some invaluable contributions while pressing. Lucas Paquetá has been a bit more mixed, but when he’s on it he’s played some gorgeous passes forward that should have resulted in more than his singular assist. (He had a hand in at least two more goals by my count.) Rayan has more than a little bit of newly-birthed-foal clumsiness to him, but his size and strength have already been an impressive asset and Raphinha may find it hard to return to the starting XI once he’s recovered from his injury. While I have concerns about Casemiro and whoever we play at right-back, the defensive side of the team has generally been very capable and played like it, and as the team’s game plan becomes ever more coherent it seems like they’re starting to figure out how to minimize the vulnerability of those weak sectors.

That said, now we face a team that should give us some unique challenges.

Folks, I have a confession to make: I was in a good mood after the Morocco game on Saturday.

I know, I know. The sky-is-falling reactions extended well beyond our own small and sometimes pessimistic community. Lots of people saw Brazil make countless sloppy giveaways and struggle to get anywhere near Morocco’s passing moves and assumed the worst about our World Cup chances, but I can’t say I did. Blame the fact that I had guests over for the game and was a couple of caipirinhas deep by its end, or blame the Knicks for winning the NBA championship later that night and sending all of New York into an infectious good mood. Either way, I felt all right about things after the game, and in the moment, this was my reasoning:

– The Seleção historically starts a little slow in their first game of the World Cup. On top of that, they’d never before opened their tournament with a game against a top-four team from the previous edition. (In 2002, they opened against Turkey, who would go on to finish third, but had absolutely no previous World Cup pedigree; they hadn’t qualified since the 1950s.)

– A draw still very much leaves Brazil with a good chance of winning the group. It may well come down to which team can rack up a bigger goal difference against Haiti and Scotland, and while this game reinforced wider doubts about the team, I do think we have the talent to beat up on lesser teams.

– This team is still very much a work in progress. Although Morocco very recently replaced their coach, even more recently than us. But they at least have the benefit of much more coherent planning from their federation, don’t they?

– Also, uh, it was really hot, I think the hottest game of the first round so far. That makes things harder, right?

Anyways, I figured I should watch the game again, to see if the doomerism on here was justified or whether my rosy outlook actually owed to something other than drinking a bunch of rosé. (I didn’t actually drink rosé, but the pun was right there.) So I did that, and here are my thoughts…

IT IS HERE. The World Cup. The biggest, greediest, most bloated, most extortionate, possibly most confusing, though probably not the most outright evil (yet), World Cup in history.

To say that people are excited would be an overstatement. Here in New York City, a place perhaps best known as the partial namesake of the world-famous New York New Jersey Stadium that will host the final, some bars have put up little flags and streamers, many of which got shredded in a weekend storm, and my local CVS has some World Cup merch. I did see this slightly creepy bust of Lionel Messi in the window of the West 34th Street Macy’s, at least:

Okay, that last paragraph is slightly unfair. Today, the first day of the World Cup itself, I started seeing a fair few people in Manhattan wearing national team gear, and I definitely saw more Brazil shirts than any other. (Though the Knicks are lapping everybody else in the apparel department, especially after that Game 4.) And now that the first games have started, I can’t help but start getting into the spirit of things, even with all the bullshit surrounding the tournament. (That’s how they get you!)

It’s just two days (maybe less by the time you read this) until Brazil’s opener against Morocco, which is being played at that very New York New Jersey Stadium, so close to me and yet so far away (not just because getting there from the city is a fucking nightmare, but because the cheapest ticket I’m seeing on the FIFA website right now is going for $1,384). Since I last checked in, Brazil won their final preparatory friendly against Egypt, a 2-1 win that included a bunch of encouraging signs (a ton of chances created, Endrick’s first Seleção goal for two years) and saw a few old concerns bubble up (we missed a lot of those chances, and Egypt’s goal was the product of yet another defensive fuckup). I’ve already made most of my thoughts on our situation clear, I hope, but I’d like to cover a few last questions and concerns before our debut at the tournament itself.

Before anything else, an up-to-date look at the squad: