In the, um, extremely long time since I last wrote a post on here, I’ve been thinking about our now-former coach, Fernando Diniz, whose six-game tenure in charge of Brazil spiraled down the toilet in remarkable style. A 5-1 debut win against Bolivia was fun but very much expected; following that up a couple days later with a listless performance and a late winner from a corner against Peru was concerning. By the next pair of games a month later, conceding a late equalizer to Venezuela at home and then losing in dismal fashion to Uruguay, the alarm bells were well and truly clanging. Losses in November to Colombia and Argentina added to Diniz’s lists of unfortunate achievements (first time Brazil had lost three qualifiers in a row, first time they’d lost a qualifier at home to Argentina) and sealed his fate. Diniz has a signature style of football, one that, on paper, hews closer to the romantic image of jogo bonito than most Brazil teams of the past thirty or forty years, and that’s why he got the job. With the limited training time afforded to national teams, and with Diniz still coaching Fluminense at the same time (with real success, to be fair)—or maybe just because Diniz was too tactically blind to adjust to changing game states or too wedded to his ideas to temper them with the slightest bit of pragmatism—he couldn’t make it work for Brazil.

In the piece I linked above, which I wrote at about the same point in Diniz’s tenure that we have reached in his successor’s, I linked to something I wrote five years earlier, when Diniz had his first gig in charge of a top-flight club at Athletico Paranaense and took on what was then the most impressive attacking coach and team in Brazil, Renato Gaúcho’s Grêmio. And rereading that, I couldn’t help but notice that my description of that game rang pretty familiar to what we saw when Diniz took charge of Brazil:

This just kept happening. Atlético kept trying to play out of the back by having the goalie pass to a teammate at the edge of the penalty box; Grêmio kept flooding the box with their front four or five and robbing the ball in unbelievably good scoring positions. The highlight reel is essentially a nonstop montage of the Tricolor pressing ridiculously high up and just absolutely leaving Atlético at sixes and sevens.

me, in 2018

That’s just one example, and the whole thing sounds like what we saw against Colombia or Uruguay: a Diniz team playing with fire defensively and being unable to construct anything up at the other end of the pitch. At the time, it felt like Athletico were overmatched in terms of talent, and they ultimately snatched a scoreless draw after Grêmio got tired, but looking back on it, they probably didn’t deserve it. And it’s hard to argue that Diniz’s style did anything to actually help them get that result, to the extent that it was even visible through all the cheap turnovers.

And so I find myself thinking today: Was Diniz’s style ever actually good? Or was it just interesting? And did Brazilian football culture, now undeniably a backwater when it comes to stylistic and tactical matters, mistake the latter for the former? This is undeniably harsh on my part; Diniz has plenty of genuine accomplishments as a coach and his unique style has certainly been a part of that, albeit not consistently. Not to mention that the CBF was operating under the delusion that they were going to get Carlo Ancelotti in a year, and so could afford to give a chance to one of the few coaches legitimately trying to do anything to escape from Brazil’s tactical backwater. But still: were people looking for something that was never really there? And were they looking for it because, trapped in the stagnant currents of the Brazilian domestic game and unwilling or unable to look abroad at the latest advancements in the global game, they had nothing to compare it to?

Or was there something there, but just a seed of some future potential, something that could one day be great, but must be shepherded and guided in its growth? After Fluminense faced Manchester City in the Club World Cup final in December, Diniz crowed about how his team had gone toe-to-toe with the best team in the world for 20 minutes. And he was right! For a good chunk of the first half, Fluminense really did match City at their own game, controlling possession and passing the ball around beautifully. But they were already down 1-0 after conceding an extremely sloppy goal in the first minute, and they ultimately lost 4-0. Even a more pragmatic approach with more of a defensive focus was unlikely to have worked against a team as vastly more resourced and talented as Manchester City, and Diniz can point to those 20 minutes as evidence of what he can do with more resources. (Just forget the 540 or so minutes of evidence to the contrary that he produced with the resources of the Seleção.) Part of me thinks Diniz will turn out like Marcelo Bielsa: a coach hailed as a visionary, and lauded as an influence or inspiration by many of the most successful coaches on the planet, but one who is too fanatically wedded to his style and his most dogmatic ideas about how to play the game to actually truly succeed at the highest level. Bielsa has won an Olympic gold medal and an English second division title this century. Compare that to Pep Guardiola or even Jorge Sampaoli, two of the many coaches who cite him as inspiration. Perhaps this is unfair to Diniz, whose Libertadores title win and more minor trophies at least match Bielsa’s successes. On the other hand, there would be worse fates than inspiring a generation of interesting and successful Brazilian coaches.

Now I find myself thinking about Dorival Júnior, Brazil’s newest coach. Those more familiar with him say he’s attack-minded and tactically flexible, building teams around his players rather than trying to make them conform to a preferred formation or style. I think we can expect a baseline level of competence from him; he won’t insist on maintaining only a two-man midfield when the team is being overrun, or yank the team’s best player and instantly make everything fall apart. But he’s still part of the backwater. He may be a good coach, but he’s a good coach by the standards of an environment that may have become incapable of producing great ones. He’s already raising eyebrows, and not in the good way: several of the players in his first Brazil callup were clearly personal favorites. Some, like João Gomes or Lucas Beraldo, would have been firmly in the conversation either way. Others, like Ayrton Lucas and goalie Rafael Pires, make desperately little sense even considering Dorival knows them well. Quality defenders playing in Europe like Bremer, Murillo, and Carlos Augusto made way for domestic stars like Ayrton and Palmeiras’ Murilo (one L; the Nottingham Forest Murilo has two Ls).

Still, Dorival chose a good group of midfielders and forwards, one largely without these sorts of questionable choices (I’ll defend André as being pretty decent, and I’m curious to see if Pablo Maia is any good). Perhaps that group will end up decimated; I watched Gabriel Martinelli have to be helped off the pitch earlier today, and of course the likes of João Pedro and Matheus Cunha didn’t even get called up because of unfortunate recent injuries. And Brazil’s next two games, against England and Spain, would pose a tough test even in better times. But Dorival has assembled plenty of good pieces here; next he must demonstrate that he knows how to put them together.

Goleiros:

Bento – Athletico-PR 

Ederson- Manchester City

Rafael – São Paulo 

Laterais:

Danilo – Juventus

Yan Couto – Girona

Ayrton Lucas – Flamengo

Wendell – Porto

Zagueiros:

Beraldo – PSG

Gabriel Magalhães – Arsenal

Marquinhos – PSG

Murilo – Palmeiras 

Meio-campistas:

André – Fluminense

Andreas Pereira – Fulham

Casemiro – Manchester United

João Gomes – Wolverhampton

Bruno Guimarães – Newcastle

Douglas Luiz – Aston Villa

Lucas Paquetá – West Ham

Pablo Maia – São Paulo

Atacantes:

Endrick – Palmeiras

Rodrygo – Real Madrid

Gabriel Martinelli – Arsenal

Raphinha – Barcelona

Richarlison – Tottenham

Savinho – Girona

Vinicius Junior – Real Madrid