Renato Gaúcho puts his opinion on Flamengo de Jesus to the test at Libertadores

Flamengo coach, Libertadores finalist, Renato Gaúcho, 59, is described as a mental strength by his peers.

Manager Gerson Oldenburg, who has been with him since the beginning, as a coach at Madureira, in 2001, the first act of his career outside the four lines, remains in the head.

He accepted an offer for R$8,000 a month from the club in the north of Rio de Janeiro and convinced the athletes that he needed a gala debut.

It was necessary to beat Vasco, the Brazilian champion for three days, in São Januário. In the rain, he imposed a 2-1 turnaround on the cruzmaltino team, which had many embezzlements, but had Pedrinho and Viola on the field, for example.

“I’ve met a lot of people in football, but that’s nothing compared to the confidence he has. I would say that’s his greatest virtue,” Oldenburg tells sheet.

Even in his third Libertadores final in his career — he played in 2008 for Fluminense and in 2017 for Grêmio —, the coach has been questioned whether he is able to pilot the starred Flemish squad.

There were few moments of honeymoon and many of war. The last one, a viral manifestation of fans on social networks during the week of the decision with Palmeiras, in Montevideo: “Win Libertadores and quit”.

The reason for the anger of the Flamengo fans was an alleged apathy on the part of the coach in the goals scored by the team in the 2-2 draw against Grêmio, his former club, in Porto Alegre, in a late match for the second round of the Brazilian Championship.

The team also conceded two goals when it had one more player on the field, due to the expulsion of Jhonata Robert, and allowed an unexpected reaction from the gauchos.

Asked if Flamengo had alleviated for Grêmio, threatened with relegation, the coach showed annoyance: “this is a kind of question that offends me”, he replied. Once named for the selection and praised work, Renato arrives at the decision bearing unprecedented pressure.

Visibly dejected after the 3-0 defeat by Athletico Paranaense, on October 27, which eliminated Flamengo from the Copa do Brasil in the middle of Maracanã, he needed to hear in the first question a question about the weight of the phrase said while coach of Grêmio, in 2019, that the Portuguese Jorge Jesus had “obligation to make a 200 million reais team play”.

“He’s a guy who doesn’t feel pressure, he’s always too cold to make decisions. Nobody spends four years and seven months at Grêmio for nothing”, defends Oldenburg.

“It’s part of taking responsibility for him. Some blame others, but he doesn’t. He assumes and says he’s the best because he trusts what he does. It’s like Cristiano Ronaldo’s mind, for example,” he adds.

Léo Moura tells that, in 2018, with players still returning from vacation and the tricolor team threatened with relegation in the Gaucho Championship, he surprised the Grêmio locker room by saying that he would guarantee classification even with one point added in five matches.

“Take advantage of it because there are only seven vacancies. One is from Grêmio,” he said at the press conference. “It’s difficult for you to work in a group with 30 players and not see any frowning, or upset. I can say for sure: he’s the best group manager I’ve ever worked with,” explains the former full-back.

People close to Renato assure, for example, that the choice to live at the Deville hotel, in Porto Alegre, during his entire last visit to Grêmio, was due to a face that few mention, that of a scholar.

On match days, he rarely leaves his room early to go to the stadium. It is also common to watch several matches.

Interestingly, the coach still struggles with a collection of phrases contrary to the subject in football. The image of him playing footvolley on Ipanema beach was marked while names like Tite, Mano Menezes and Dunga, the last three coaches of the selection, shared the classroom in Teresópolis, in the CBF courses.

“Football is like riding a bicycle. Who knows, knows. Who doesn’t know, will study”, he replied at the time.

“I wasn’t present in Renato’s class, but the teachers told me that he sat in the front rows and participated a lot. This is another character, he’s iconic. You can’t build what he did at Grêmio with ‘come on, let’s go’, guessing or ‘catch it, catch it'”, explains Ricardo Drubscky, one of the professors of the degrees at the entity that governs Brazilian football.

Reaching the decision could not even have happened. During Flamengo’s unexpected elimination in the Copa do Brasil, the coach needed to hear choruses from the crowd asking for the return of Jorge Jesus and began to be bombarded by the insistence on collective training and disregard for the tactical part. Players came to his defense.

Off the field, the close connection with President Jair Bolsonaro (no party), of whom he is a declared voter, is disliked. He was even consulted by the politician, by telephone, about the return of the games in Brazil, at the height of the new coronavirus pandemic.

“I called Renato to get information from him about what the athlete thinks about returning to football or not,” Bolsonaro reported at the time.

Friends and people close to him say that the coach never had an “animal”, the name given to awards for titles and other goals in football, during the cycle at Grêmio. I always valued the employees, to be shared.

The altruistic face was also revealed in the pandemic, in May 2020, when he donated seven tons of food to families who lived near the Arena do Grêmio.

Under pressure, Renato is already the coach with the most victories in the history of Libertadores (50 so far) and, among Brazilians, he can reach a select hall of two achievements, occupied by Lula, Telê Santana, Luiz Felipe Scolari and Paulo Autuori.

If they win the Libertadores final against Palmeiras, this Saturday (27), at 5 pm, in Montevideo, a new wave of statements in the best Renato style of being is almost certain.