Watching Brazil’s last two games, helped me focus in thinking what a tragedy it would be were Vicente del Bosque’s team to be knocked out in the early stages of this World Cup.
For all the media hype surrounding the host nation in the run up to the tournament, this Brazil team has yet to convince me that they are worthy pretenders to the crown. My scepticism is provoked in large measure by Neymar, whose reputation has been fuelled less by any enduring evidence of his exceptionality than by a questionable transfer deal involving FC Barcelona.
Neymar can have moments of brilliance but so can other less promoted players like Oscar and captain Thiago Silva. Stardom nevertheless is in a minority in the host nation’s team, and Brazil seems to lack a team ethos.
Clearly there is a huge weight of expectation on Neymar’s shoulders- his face publicises a plethora of products across Brazil and he is competing with Messi to emerge as the player of this tournament on Latin America soil, surpassing Pele and Maradona – but this risks turning the Brazilian team into a one-player dependant team that fails when he cannot deliver as happened in the game with Mexico.
By contrast, since breaking the myth of being football’s ‘great underachievers’ in Euro2008, Spain has given football fans around the world many hours of simply brilliant football played by a collection of players whose solidarity and creativity has been moulded and encouraged by Vicente del Bosque, a coach that has taken success for granted nor to lose sight of the fact that football, like life, is in the end just a game, and we are all merely players.
The Spain that was crushed by Holland in its opening game was not a mediocre team, still less a bad team, but simply a team whose players had temporarily forgotten their proven ability to excel and their well-earned reputation as World Champions. In other words Spain had temporarily lost a sense of its own worth.
Psychology will play a huge part in Spain’s match against Chile later today. Spain needs to remind itself from where it has come from and who they still are-the team that came to this World Cup with the most exciting and successful squad of players of any in the tournament and with a proven collective ability to produce poetry in motion and to deliver magical victories. It also needs to score goals and not concede. Spain needs to play and win like a true champion of the world. This tournament need the best of the Spanish La Roja.
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