Brazil vs. England

Wembley Stadium, London, England, March 23, 2024

Kickoff: 3:00PM EST / 4:00 PM BRT / 7:00 PM GMT

US TV: FOX

Likely Starting Lineup: Bento; Danilo, Fabrício Bruno, Beraldo, Wendell; João Gomes, Bruno Guimarães, Lucas Paquetá; Raphinha, Rodrygo, Vini Jr.

On The Bench: Léo Jardim, Rafael; Yan Couto, Ayrton Lucas, Bremer, Murilo; André, Andreas Pereira, Douglas Luiz, Pablo Maia; Endrick, Pepê, Galeno, Richarlison, Savinho.

Notes and Storylines

The big storyline is obviously that this is new coach Dorival Júnior’s first game in charge. I wrote a little bit about him in my last post, though I ended up mostly reflecting on Fernando Diniz and his brief and mostly catastrophic tenure. Diniz came in with a reputation as a tactical innovator, though he ended up being quite dogmatic and inflexible, sticking with an approach that left Brazil defensively vulnerable and overrun in midfield even as it delivered neither performances nor results. Dorival, by contrast, has a reputation as someone who isn’t nearly as ambitious, but also doesn’t get in the way of his players; he finds a setup that works for the players he has.

Hopefully Dorival can get the team playing well, and I expect this will at least signify a return to a baseline level of tactical competence that neither Diniz nor Ramon Menezes ever delivered. But there are definitely question marks about Dorival’s player selections. Tim Vickery wrote about how many players in this squad seemed like personal favorites of the coach, and on top of that, injuries since the squad announcement have prompted some… questionable choices of replacement. Bremer is a quality center-back who is a regular starter for one of the biggest clubs in Europe, and Dorival left him out of his original callup in favor of Murilo of Palmeiras, who isn’t even the Murillo of Nottingham Forest (with two Ls in his name) who’s legitimately one of the most exciting young Brazilian center-backs out there. When an injury to Marquinhos opened the door for Bremer or Murillo to get another look, Dorival instead opted for Fabrício Bruno, who was part of his 2022 Copa Libertadores-winning Flamengo team, before another injury to Gabriel Magalhães finally compelled him to give Bremer a call. He’s still selected a group of mostly good players and a decent starting XI, albeit with a couple of odd choices in the latter. But to reiterate, I’m expecting at worst something like what we saw under Tite, where we all complained about how Paulinho kept starting games but Brazil largely still got results. Hopefully Dorival exceeds my expectations a bit, because we’re not going to win a World Cup with baseline competence. But I’ll take baseline competence for a few games.

One thing Dorival has definitely done right is hire a sports psychologist. I groused about Tite’s decision not to hire one after our World Cup defeat to Croatia, but the problem was deeper than that; Luiz Felipe Scolari was the last Seleção coach to have a psychologist on staff, and that was almost ten years ago. Of course, that staff psychologist wasn’t able to prevent the team’s meltdown against Germany in the World Cup semifinal. I still think it’s a good idea to have one on staff, and so does Richarlison, who this week said that he was “at rock bottom” late last year and that his decision to seek therapy “saved [his] life”. Being open about mental health is just the latest thing to admire about Richarlison, and it’s a refreshing change of pace from recent news about Brazilian footballers being imprisoned for rape, being sentenced for rape but still for some reason given a chance to flee the country, or having to deny that they will pay a seven-figure sum to bail out their friend convicted of rape (real “my ‘didn’t pay seven figures out to bail out a convicted rapist’ shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt” energy on that last one). Anyways, Richarlison is a king and I won’t let small details like the question of how good of a player he actually is get in the way of that.

The other big news going into this game concerns Brazil’s injury nightmare. Seleção players have been absolutely cursed this season, a problem which also affected Fernando Diniz but seems only to have worsened. Notable names unavailable for these games include Alisson, Ederson, Marquinhos, Gabriel Magalhães, Éder Militão, Casemiro, Joelinton, Neymar, Gabriel Martinelli, Matheus Cunha, and João Pedro—enough to form a quality starting XI in their own right. I wish it was easier to find comprehensive injury data to figure out whether Brazilians are actually being injured at a greater rate than players from other countries. I will say that I’m pretty sure injuries are higher across the board. COVID pauses and the 2022 World Cup created long periods of schedule crunch, and there’s some decent evidence that COVID-19 infection itself makes athletes more injury-prone. England, for their part, just had to cut Bukayo Saka, at least the third Arsenal player who had to be cut due to injury after Brazil’s Gabriéis. This is not an uncommon occurrence for Arsenal’s Brazilians; it’s at least the third time all three have been left out of an international date in the last two seasons. To put on my tinfoil hat for a second, it seems to be tacitly acknowledged that English clubs in particular will invent or exaggerate injuries to keep their players out of international duty, and I don’t even need my tinfoil hat to point out that Edu Gaspar, Arsenal’s sporting director, has very close ties to the CBF as a result of his time working under Tite.

That said, speaking of things I don’t know for sure, here’s something I’ve been struggling with for a while. I don’t know anymore which Brazilian midfielders are actually good replacements for Casemiro. I haven’t watched as much of André or Danilo or João Gomes or even Douglas Luiz as I should, partly because their teams aren’t on TV as much and I don’t like paying for a subscription service just to watch their games, and partly because as I’ve gotten older and busier and lazier I think I’ve just become less good at focusing on one or two players in the middle of the park. My point isn’t really about not knowing which of them are good, though; I’ve seen them all do some impressive stuff. Luiz has a real knack for appearing in the box to score as well as some pinpoint long shots and corner kicks; I’ve seen Gomes make some lung-busting runs to start and finish attacks; Danilo can both start plays with booming long passes and show up in the right place to finish them off. But most of this impressive stuff doesn’t do much to answer a key question: can they anchor a midfield like Casemiro can? Can they position themselves in the right place to break up a developing play, or make clean tackles multiple times a game, or know when to risk a yellow card to stop a potential counter? Is that even an admirable set of qualities to have in a single player anymore? Is it an unheralded sign of much-needed modernization in the Brazilian game that these players aren’t so easily categorized as “volantes” in the same way one could Casemiro or Fabinho or Luiz Gustavo or Felipe Melo? Might this mean that the next Fernandinho doesn’t get pushed into the destroyer role when his talents are better used further up the pitch? I don’t know. I do know this: this upcoming generation of players is kinda short! The four I’ve mentioned are all 5-foot-9, per Wikipedia, as are Vini Jr., Rodrygo, Raphinha, and Savinho, and other youngsters like Endrick and Vitor Roque are even shorter.

But back to the point about evaluating players, something similar has happened with my assessment of center-backs. If anything, it’s worse for center-backs because it’s even harder to focus on them and draw conclusions about their play from a single game. I don’t know; maybe Fabrício Bruno really is good, and I can’t fault Dorival too much for wanting to have a couple players he’s coached in his starting lineup (Gomes is the other). Flamengo have kept a clean sheet in their last 11 games, a streak going back to late January. But whenever I tune in to Flamengo in the Libertadores or a big Brasileirão match, he’s not the guy I’m watching.

All this, along with not being able to write here as often as I’d like, is why I want to open up the blog to articles from other posters, much like what Black Matt did back in the day. I haven’t really thought much about the details, but I did want to give a heads-up so you can start thinking about what you might want to write if given the chance.

Anyways, it’s time to make a prediction, and I have some history to work with here. 11 years ago, Brazil played their first game under a newly-appointed coach, in that case Luiz Felipe Scolari, against England at Wembley. On that day, Scolari made a couple of lineup choices that backfired (Ronaldinho was a shell of his former self and missed a penalty) and in the second half brought on a relative nobody who was enjoying a good season for a Brazilian club (Arouca, playing for Santos at the time) who ended up making a crucial mistake that led to England’s winning goal and was never seen in a yellow shirt again. Will history repeat all those specifics? For all that we’ve griped about Dorival’s selection of players like Fabrício Bruno and André, it would still be a stretch. But we could definitely see a repeat of the result. I don’t think there’d be much shame in a 2-1 loss in the new coach’s first game in charge. It’d be nice to break Brazil’s winless streak at the new Wembley Stadium, but I don’t think that’ll happen this time. At least we’ll get to watch on broadcast TV in the States, for once! FOX is carrying this match.

(Funnily enough, we played England again later that year at the Maracanã and drew 2-2. The dates of the two games? February 6 and June 2. 2/6/2013 and 6/2/2013. Fun little coincidence!)