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.
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