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Ganso and Neymar modeled the 2012 Brazil kit this week.

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Photo of the Day: New Kits

As per Sambafoot and several other sources, Roberto Carlos has decided to retire from Anzhi at the end of the year.  He plans to continue with the club in some capacity, which is very interesting to me.  Despite being the subject of more than one racial dispute, Roberto Carlos seems to have found a home he can love.  It makes me sad that that home is in Russia and not in Brazil.  It makes me even sadder to think about the circumstances that made him leave Corinthians, and Brazil in general, back in 2010.  The way Brazilian fans sometimes treat their legends could be a long and frustrating article in and of itself. Roberto Carlos is one of my three favorite Brazilians of all time – at least of the ones that I’ve been alive to see in their prime.  (The other two are Ronaldo and Lucio, if anyone cares.  Bebeto and Kaka round out the top 5.)  But how do we gauge his place in the history of the Selecão? I’ll give you three digits

Originally posted here:
Farewell, Roberto Carlos

I know that this is a bit of a bold statement to make about a man who has kept his side at the summit of the Premier league table practically since it kicked off back in August. But watching City huff and puff against Liverpool in the League Cup semi final poking at them with the imagination and creative spark of a spineless hedgehog it was plainly obvious that Mancini, the manager, has nothing up sleeve. It is fast coming to light that he is no tactical magician to compete with the likes of Guardiola or Mourinho and there is no doubt that the miserable git is no motivational speaker like Sir Alex Ferguson. The Liverpool match was not the only game in recent weeks where City have been found wanting. A 0-0 draw with West Brom and defeats to Sunderland and Chelsea all followed a similar pattern. City kept the ball well without creating too much before relying heavily on knocking the ball to Aguero in the hope that he can conjure something special. But if their league form has been dismal of late then their Champions League campaign was a total disaster and one that simply underlines my point, Mancini is not a great manager.

Yes Mancini’s side look fantastic on occasions but when you have spent 1 billion or whatever it is on top notch players you would expect them to click and be able to perform, but it is when things are not quite going to plan that you need your manager to work his magic and it is here that Mancini falls short as he seems to be very limited when it comes to making quick, sharp tactical decisions. Chelsea had a similar problem when Roman Abramovich took over the club. They had Italian tinker man Claudio Ranieri at the helm and the Russian billionaire gave him all of the money he needed to bring success to Stamford Bridge. But it was soon clear that Ranieri lacked what was needed to make the team gel and Abramovich wielded the now infamous axe and brought in Jose Mourinho instead and we all know what happened next.

Roberto’s man management skills also have to be called in to question. A number of stars including Craig Bellamy, Emmanuel Adebyour and Carlos Tevez have left questioning his methods, his personality and his attitude.

Now all you City fans out there can sit up on your high horses and start singing “Who is top of the league,” at me, and yes I agree with you that City will probably win the Premiership this season, but lets take a look at the other contenders. Manchester Utd’s squad is paper thin, Chelsea have become distinctly average, Arsenal are re-building and although Liverpool have the best defence in the league goals are proving harder to come by than a sober Irishman for the Merseyside club especially with the 35 million flop Andy Carroll leading the line. In fact City’s main challengers might end up being Tottenham Hotspur, but again only if they can stay clear of injuries.

City are a good team no doubt about it but I feel that last season’s FA Cup win only papered over the fact that Roberto Mancini is not the man to lead them to greatness. If City’s super rich board really do want to compete with the likes of Barcelona and Real Madrid then the tough decision to sack the Italian will have to be made and sooner rather than later.

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Manchester City Needs To Sack Italian Manager Roberto Mancini

Greetings.  I had planned to continue the 2012 Outlook series this week, with a look at the candidates for the right-back position, but I’ll hold off on that for a week.  I wanted to write a few thoughts about the big matchup over the weekend, Brazil versus Brazil…I mean, Milan versus Inter.  It was a fairly entertaining match, despite the scoreline.  Milan dominated most of the first half, but wayward finishing doomed them.  Inter was probably the better team in the 2 nd half, as Milan’s midfield began to come apart.  Inter generally looked to play on the counter throughout the game, and it was on the counter that they scored, with the much-maligned Diego Milito continuing his recent run of form.  But it’s not the teams as a whole that concern us, but the performances of our national team heroes.  Milan has always been the home away from home for Brazil’s greatest stars – think Cafu, Leonardo, Kaka, Dida, even Rivaldo; and Ronaldo, Lucio, Maicon, and Julio Cesar.

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Some thoughts on Brazil vs Brazil…I mean, Milan vs Inter

First of all, a massive apology for being absent from the blog the past two months. Long story short, my computer completely died and did not get a new one until after the holidays. Thanks to Black Matt for keeping things going in the meantime

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Brazil Announces Five Friendlies

Warning: this article is really, really long.  Is there anything that haunts Brazilian football more than the specter of their famous 1982 team?  It’s not just that they were loaded with stars.  (They were.)  Or that their coach, Tele Santana, is credited with bringing back “flair” to the national team.  (He did.)  1982 was the apex of “football as romantic expression.”  Of style over substance.  Of the road versus results.  The very fact that the team lost is almost proof of their virtue, as if they eschewed such ignoble ambitions like “winning,” or such robotic practices like “doing whatever it takes to win” in favor of pure artistry.  As the saying goes, it’s not the destination that matters…it’s the journey.  Analyzing the truth behind this is hard to do, especially if we view the past through canary-colored glasses.  (I know, I know, I’ve used this line before.  I can’t help it.)  For one thing, there’s no doubt that the team did not place style over results, nor did their fans at the time.  The team as a whole was crushed after their quarterfinal loss to Italy, vainly trying to provide answers to shell-shocked journalists, muttering banalities like “this was the day that football died.”  If the players really were committed to some fantastic ideal, that it was less about what you did and more about how you did it , they would have left the pitch with their heads held high rather than with their heads bowed.  Still, there’s at least some truth to the notion, considering that to this day, the world remembers Zico’s Brazil more than they do the eventual winners, Paolo Rossi’s Italy.  Unless you’re an Italian, anyway.  Brazil ’82 was an event, something like a Woodstock, or a JFK assassination.  You remember where you were when you watched them.  Decades later, men and women who were in their teens back then still say things like, “I saw them, I was there .”  Brazil ’82 played with such an intuitive understanding, with such selflessness, with such audacity and playfulness, it really was like watching a group of eleven men united for a Cause.  The fact that they were defeated turned it into a Lost Cause, and anyone who knows anything about history knows that a Lost Cause is the most idealized, romanticized, and lamented thing of all.  So why does Brazil ’82 haunt us so much?  Because it can never be achieved again.  Because it will never be attempted again.  Because we have romanticized it to become, not just a group of eleven players who played a certain way simply because that was the way they happened to be best at, but to a group of eleven players united against the evils of pragmatism, defense and cynicism.  As soon as you turn the past into a fantasy, it becomes an unreachable ideal; a golden age we use as a backdrop to our current problems, a way to frame more modern debates.  A fallacy we use as an arguing tool when discussing everything that’s wrong with our team/country/planet today.  We see it most in the two premier arenas for irrational thought: sports, and politics.  Why does Brazil ’82 haunt us so much?  Because they represent both a stylistic and philosophical past that the Selecão have turned away from.  The fact that neither the style nor the philosophy are truly tenable today is beside the point.  We are primarily dissatisfied creatures.  I’ve read that some experts consider this an evolutionary trait – our own inherent tendency towards dissatisfaction is what keeps us, as a race, from becoming stagnant or complacent.  It drives us to move onward and upward.  It compels us to achieve.  But we have to have a way to justify our dissatisfaction.  Brazil 1982 is the way we justify our dissatisfaction in the fact that, despite Brazil’s tradition of winning World Cups and South American Cups and Confederations Cups almost at will for the last 20 years, there were road bumps along the way.  Moments when the team embraced an uglier nature.  Moments where the Cause was abandoned, and the team was willing to do whatever it took to win at any cost, which, when you think about it, brought them down to earth from their lofty perch.  It made the team – and Brazil as a whole – just like everybody else.  But is this dissatisfaction legitimate?  Or, stated another way, is it worth it?  Has Brazil really abandoned the Cause?  Was there ever any Cause at all?  I answer “no” to both questions, and the reason why is because they are really the same question.  Brazil never really abandoned any Cause to play beautifully, or creatively, or with flair, or what have you, because there was never any Cause to begin with.  For almost 100 years, Brazil, in general and by nature, has produced players more technically skilled than the rest of the world.  Along with that technical skill comes the inevitable desire to experiment.  Anyone who has talent in anything wants to explore his or her boundaries, wants to test the limit of that skill.  That is where creativity comes from.  Hence, the Brazilian teams were for many decades not only more technically adept than their competitors, but also more creative, experimental and playful as well, which is the inevitable outlet of that technical skill.  There has been perhaps no greater display of this fact than in the 1982 World Cup.   Thus, there was never any “Cause” to play beautifully.  Playing beautifully, to Pele, Didi, Garrincha, Gerson, Rivelino, Jairzinho, Tostao, Zico, Socrates, Falcao, and Cerezo was natural .  So too did the players of future generations, but in their case, they were raised in a world that knew what Brazil ’82 was soon to discover: the world itself was changing, and what was “natural” soon just wouldn’t be enough.  Thus, any change in style has been the result of external factors, not internal ones, and any change in philosophy is merely revisionist history.  An application of wishful thinking after the fact.  To me, all this is obvious, because: A) Brazil ’82 lost B) Brazil ’82 took that loss hard C) Brazil ’82 went into the World Cup stating their intention to win, not to “play beautifully, and then if we lose, so be it.”  D) The reasons why Brazil ’82 lost were immediately apparent to just about everyone, and the changes that resulted from the loss (or rather, the changes that began to result) were because Brazil wanted and expected to win .  E) Thus, if Brazil wanted to win , and changes would have to take place in order to do so, those changes in and of themselves were natural .  So Carlos Alberto Parreira’s Brazil, or Scolari’s Brazil, or even Dunga’s Brazil, were not any less “Brazilian” than 1982.  They just look different.  Because being “Brazilian” in 2011 is not the same as being Brazilian in 1982.  The world is different, and Brazilian football has to change with it.  Brazil still produces players of great technical ability, with great creativity and imagination, but the rest of the world produces players like that too, and the game itself has evolved to where the world now demands other skills as well in order to succeed.  Brazil has developed those other skills, and have learned to temper their existing ones in order to fit them both together, to achieve the exact same end that Brazil has always sought: to win.  The point of all this is to say that no longer should Brazil, or Brazilian players, or Brazilian fans, be haunted by the 1982 World Cup team.  No longer should they be expected, or forced, to live up to some imaginary ideal.  Rather, we should look at 1982 for what it is: a chance to learn some extremely valuable lessons, both in how to play, and how not to play.  Because make no mistake, Mano Menezes and company could learn volumes from Tele Santana and crew.  But these lessons are not stylistic and they are not philosophic.  They are technical.  They are tactical.  Now let’s cover what those lessons are.  ———– World Cup 1982 If you want to look at it that way, we could call the Brazil vs Argentina  the equivalent of a Round-of-16 match.  But in ’82, there were actually two group stages, a first and a second round, before the proper knock-out stages.  It was here where Brazil and Argentina met, though the paths the two teams took to get there were very different.  Brazil were a team in their prime.  Their campaign actually got off to a nervy start, falling behind 1-0 to the Soviet Union, but the scare was to be a short one.  Brazil dominated for most of the game, equaling in the 75 th minute from a spectacular shot by Socrates, then going ahead 12 minutes later through Eder.  The next match was against Scotland.  Again, Brazil fell behind, but in the words of Scottish defender Alan Hansen, this merely stirred the Selecão up.  ”…we annoyed them by scoring first, and I very quickly learned a couple of things.

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Selecão Classics: Brazil vs Argentina 1982 World Cup