Brazil flirt with boom and bust

Shortly after Brazil’s dour scoreless draw with Mexico last week, a gang of kids lit a firework on a wide stretch of the pavement on Rua Das Laranjeiras in Rio.

Passersby paused to watch the show which, initially, was very pleasant: a couple of satisfyingly loud bangs and colourful sprays erupting overhead in the night sky.

But this turned out to be merely the misleading prelude. The unexpected climax, when it came, had those close by running for cover and many more emerging out of their apartments and businesses to see what the hell was going on, as a thunderous explosion sent rockets flying in all directions, one of which — trailing a luminous green tail like a comet — whizzed just a few feet above ground level across four lanes of traffic, narrowly missing two girls walking on the opposite side of the road, before slamming into a wall.

There was acrid smoke still drifting across the street when we gingerly approached to survey the launch site, and came upon the smouldering remains of a device which, for all the world, looked like a miniature version of one of those fearsome old Soviet Katyusha weapons: a dozen blackened tubes tightly packed together in a shoebox-sized container.

If ever you wanted it, here was proof that the Brazilian football firework is to the Irish Halloween banger as Apocalypse Now is to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Or maybe it’s just that it was a special one kept in reserve to express explosive anger rather than sunny celebration. Certainly, there was little enough for cariocas to feel happy about in their team’s terrible performance that day whereas, after Monday night’s victory over Cameroon, the mood in the city was somewhat closer to carnivalesque, the cheers and rhythms and booms and bangs reverberating late into the night.

And, yet, it was still possible to detect more relief than elation in the partying. Brazilians, better than anyone, know their football, and they certainly don’t need a visitor to tell them that the team of Felipao is not one for the ages — and, of much more immediate concern, maybe not even one for the rest of this World Cup. The 4-1 scoreline might have been a pleasingly iconic one but any other similarities with Mexico ’70 were entirely coincidental.

This is a Brazil team with a default setting of functionality rather than flair but, worse, much worse, a Brazil team which too often malfunctions when addressing the very basic elements of the game. Far too many times over the course of 90 minutes they look like trouble waiting to happen, especially at the back, where sloppiness, lapses in concentration and general harem scarem defending has been the disorder of the day.

Monday night’s improved second-half performance owed a good deal to the replacement of Paulinho with the more dynamic Fernandinho, but even his goalscoring intervention failed to mask the fact that, depressingly for the originators of joga bonito, this Brazilian side is almost wholly lacking in midfield creativity.

With Oscar unable to deliver on that front thus far, the middle of the park has effectively been ceded to defensive midfielders Luis Gustavo and Paulinho, neither of whom is in any danger of being mistaken for Socrates or Gerson. Indeed, such is their propensity for error, they can’t even be considered enforcers in the mould of the unlovely but authoritative Dunga.

The shining exception to all this ordinariness, of course, is Neymar.

If he was the poster boy in Brazil before this World Cup started, he is well on his way to sainthood now. At just 22, it’s too early to say if the kid from the back streets of Sao Paulo will go on to claim a permanent place in his country’s pantheon of No 10s.

But, in one respect, his achievement in almost single-handedly dragging Brazil into the second round of this tournament could be considered even more remarkable than what has gone before. After all, in 1970, Pele had around him Gerson and Tostao and Carlos Alberto and goal-a-game Jairzinho. In 1982, it’s true, Zico had the hapless Serginho missing the target — certainly one of the reasons why that Brazilian side were the best team never to win the World Cup — but there was still ample compensation in the intoxicating contributions of Socrates and Falcao and Eder.

Neymar has Fred.

Only the most black-hearted would have taken pleasure from seeing the under fire Fluminense striker become the first Brazilian No 9 not to score in the group stages of the World Cup finals, but in the streetwise boteco in Rio where I watched the game, the comically exaggerated nature of the acclaim which greeted his goal against Mexico — and an offside goal at that — made clear that the irony of it all was not lost on the natives.

“Fred Invents The Bushy Moustache Goal’, the Expresso newspaper blared from its front page yesterday, a reference to Neymar’s suggestion that if the striker grew some hair on his upper lip, he’d be bound to score.

Everything, it seems, including critical personal grooming advice, comes back to Neymar.

But whether even the golden boy can do enough to get the Selecao past Chile in Belo Horizonte on Saturday is a seriously moot point. As far back as last December, Scolari said on television here that their fellow South Americans were the team he most wanted to avoid in the last 16.

“I hope Chile don’t qualify,” the manager said then. “I’d rather play any of the others. They’re a pain to play against. They’re well organised, they’re intelligent, they have a good side. It’s better to play against a European team.”

After seeing the Chileans impress in qualifying second to the Dutch in Group B, few Brazilians will now argue the toss on that one with Big Phil, though they’ll still find plenty more of his pronouncements and decisions with which to stridently disagree.

Monday was brighter but Brazil badly need to light some real fireworks of their own on the pitch now. Otherwise, Saturday could well be the day when the host’s World Cup goes from boom to bust.