World Cup 2010: Brazil's Bullying Backfires

We are saw this World Cup 2010: Brazil's Bullying Backfires


Why did Brazil opt to drag their quarter-final against Holland pretty close to the gutter?

It is a question I am still pondering after the most cultish name in world soccer -- albeit dining out a little too generously these days on great conquests past -- crashed out of the tournament in Port Elizabeth.

If only they had kept their heads, kept their once-enviable "cool" (in several respects) then Brazil, and not the Dutch, would surely have been the ones headed onward for a semi-final date in Cape Town.

Instead their tetchy tactics backfired rather badly, a tendency to snap spitefully at heels, ankles and knees coming back to haunt them as the formula only served to fire up their opponents to battle back from a 1-0 deficit and earn a famous victory.

It might have been game, set and match the other way around had Kaka's clinical, top-corner shot in the first half -- which Brazil bossed while they kept their wits about them -- given them a 2-0 cushion. But Maarten Stekelenburg's fine save rather served as a bit of a turning point, I felt.

The Brazilians also ruefully discovered that this Dutch side is not exactly filled with shrinking violets ... certainly not with feisty characters like Nigel de Jong and Arjen Robben around.

Once the South Americans went behind, I always suspected at least one of their number would fatally flip his lid: and so it proved as Felipe Melo had one too many cynical, unsubtle jabs at Robben's hamstring and got his marching orders in the 73rd minute, when Brazil still had a strong shout at a bounce-back. Dumb, plain dumb.

The game somehow harked back to another landmark meeting at the 1974 World Cup, when Holland also overcame roughhouse tactics to win an effective semi-final (there were two group stages then) 2-0 at Dortmund.

As a 10-year-old schoolboy watching a tape of that game at a "video sports cinema" in Cape Town about a week afterwards with my Dutch dad, I specifically remember being dumdfounded and bemused by Luis Pereira's blatant rugby tackle to bring down the immortal Johan Cruyff -- already on the scoresheet -- and similarly put a final nail in the Brazilian coffin.

The current Holland side is not as accomplished as the "Total Football" legends of '74, of course, but I could not escape, nevertheless, the thought that history was repeating itself ... and Brazil had not learnt a lesson from some 36 years previously.



Source: Sport24





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