I think it’s fair to expect that the side that goes on to win this World Cup will have done so by leaving a little something on the table at every opportunity. With a longer route to the final than ever before, in a particularly hot and humid part of the world, after a club season that only gets more oversaturated every year, it is extremely prudent to save your players’ bodies whenever you’re afforded a chance to do so. The wise course of action, in a vacuum, is not to run an extra 10 kilometers in the process of turning a three-goal victory into a six-goal victory. (Although, in practice, there isn’t much correlation between covering more ground and actually winning, or even winning comfortably.) The energy saved and wear and tear avoided could mean the difference in a later game between a key player coming off hurt or not, or even just having the wind for one last crucial sprint.

In that context, the second half against Haiti makes a lot of sense. Having gone 3-0 up at the half, we took our foot completely off the gas after the break, to the point where even the injection of vigor and desperation to score of Endrick, Rayan, and Gabriel Martinelli could only rarely puncture the team’s dogged insistence on doing as little as possible. I’d ragged in my review of the Morocco match about how much if at all Brazil should even be trying to press, and Carlo Ancelotti responded with a little demonstration of what happens when we totally refuse to do so.

Reader, it’s not fun. It worked, sure, in some sense—Haiti put us under a surprising amount of pressure, and tested Alisson more than Morocco had managed to, but the defense bent without breaking and we held on to the clean sheet. Haiti have improved a lot, but had we continued in the second half like we’d finished the first, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that we might well have ended up putting five, six, even seven goals past them like in our last encounter a decade ago. But if the energy we saved by not scoring those extra two, three, four goals against them pay off with two, three, four goals down the line that help us clinch crucial knockout stage wins, then, well, obviously it’s worth it.

But it was still extremely frustrating to watch. We’ve all watched Brazil play badly before, plenty of times, but I think this one was especially aggravating because it was so clearly a choice. After creating two goals by winning the ball high up the pitch in the first half, the degree to which we sat deeper and let the ball carrier come to us was painful. Or maybe that’s just what I wanted to see, because the truth, that this Brazil team is so inept that they can’t keep Haiti from getting a substantial foothold in a game, is too painful to face. After all, there was a reasonable case to make that a big win over Haiti would help us win the group over Morocco on goal difference. Although as the bracket begins to shake out, it’s not clear how much that will matter. Whether we finish first or second, we face one of the Netherlands or Japan in the round of 32, and both those teams look scary right now. Hell, the longer I look at this bracket, the more it seems like finishing second might actually be somewhat advantageous? Finish first and we’re setting up for a potential quarterfinal against England as opposed to France/Germany for finishing second, but if we get past that (big if) the strongest team left on the finishing-second side for the semifinal would be Spain, and I have to say, I think it’s more likely that someone manages to knock them off before then than that anyone does so to Argentina on the other side.

Shit, I hope someone smarter than me in the Seleção technical staff has gamed this out. Ultimately, a lot of this all comes down to faith in whether the extremely pedigreed coach we hired at great expense to hammer a relatively untalented and extremely disorganized team into something that could contend for a World Cup has the sort of plan for this tournament that we all hope he does.

Anyways, Scotland. I’m not going to dive deeper into the Haiti game like I did with Morocco, because this game was a lot more routine and also I was sober while watching it this time.

Brazil vs. Scotland

Hard Rock Stadium (AKA Miami Stadium), Miami, Florida, June 24, 2026

Kickoff: 6:00 PM EDT / 7:00 PM BRT / 10:00 PM GMT

US TV: FOX, Telemundo

US Streaming: FOX One, Peacock

Whither Brazil?

Once again, no real lineup news has emerged by the time I’m writing this. Raphinha is of course out injured, a major blow, though the hope is he can be back for a potential quarterfinal. In the meantime, we’re down all our first-choice right-backs and our first-choice right-winger. Luiz Henrique, Rayan, Endrick, and perhaps even Gabriel Martinelli could replace him in a pinch, but at this point it’s not clear which way Ancelotti will go.

The good(?) news is that Neymar is apparently match fit at last! Perhaps we’ll even see him against Scotland, though I have a hard time believing that throwing him straight to the wolves against a fairly hard-working, physical team would work too well. Still, if we’re going to use him at all, which I’m still not sure is a good idea, we need to try and get him up to speed before we ask him to try and save us against the Netherlands or England.

The Opposition

If there’s two things I know about Scotland right now, it’s that they have something to play for and that they run a lot. At time of writing (halfway through France vs. Iraq), they’ve averaged the fourth-most distance covered per match of all teams (France is first, Brazil is 32nd, Argentina looks to be dead last). On top of that, they’re quite a tall team, though surprisingly, not that much taller on average than us. Still, they might be able (or at least willing) to out-hustle us and maybe also out-muscle us, and you know me, crowing about how important it is for Brazil to be able to compete physically, ever since the extremely tall Belgians gave us fits in 2018.

On top of that, Scotland will really be looking for at least a draw, if not a win. Four points seems to be the magic number for advancing from third in the group phase, at least according to an Opta simulation that said it sufficed 99.81% of the time, and a draw would put the Scots there. By the same token, a loss for us, while potentially very bad for morale and sending us down a tougher knockout round path (playing Mexico in Mexico and then likely England in the round of 16), would almost certainly not eliminate us.

Nonetheless, we should certainly expect to win this game. As good as John McGinn, Scott McTominay, and Andy Robertson are, and as motivated as they’ll be, we’re still the more talented side by a distance. And while a draw and second-place finish might not be the worst thing in the world bracket-wise, it’s important that this team shows that it is capable of more than the bare minimum. Unfortunately, winning the group isn’t totally in our hands, as if Morocco beats Haiti by two goals more than we beat Scotland, they win the tiebreaker—hence some of the frustration around our only beating them 3-0. But I think we’ll manage something similar to the last time we played Scotland, when a 19-year-old Neymar, in just his third appearance for Brazil, scored both goals in a 2-0 win. Maybe Neymar can repeat the feat. Or maybe… it would be Rayan’s fourth cap, not his third, but he is just 19…