Opinion – Tostão: Flamengo’s defeat for Palmeiras symbolizes the end of a team

Save Atlético, Brazilian champion, not yet officially, at least until this Tuesday’s game (30) between Flamengo and Ceará.

Save Palmeiras, champion of Libertadores. In addition to the individual and collective quality, it is a vibrant, disciplined team that goes after what is planned. Abel Ferreira built an environment of solidarity between the athletes. That’s how the world should be, with vaccines for the poorest, like those in Africa. Human consciousness cannot be of itself alone. It’s also from the other.

Flamengo’s defeat symbolizes the end of a team that was superior to the others. Now, it’s just like the best. The technical fall started before Renato Gaúcho and becomes more evident with each game. Flamengo lost the titles of Libertadores, Copa do Brasil and Brasileiro.

The match against Palmeiras was balanced, as expected. I thought that, when Flamengo drew, the team would pressurize and have great chances to win. It remained the same. If the terrible failure of Andreas Pereira, who played very well, were an athlete from Palmeiras, the analysis after the game would be very different and the one who would lose his job would be Abel Ferreira. The “if” doesn’t play, but it reminds us that, for a bit, the story could be different. The “if” helps to evolve and relativize the truth.

The midfielder Deyverson was the hero of the match and had yet another hysterical attitude, this time, unbelievable, when he rolled on the floor after the light and gentle touch of the excellent referee on his back.

The uncertainty of football does not cancel out the successes and mistakes of coaches. I don’t understand the reason why Flamengo invested so much in Kenedy, for what he always played, and why Renato did it in the second half, when the team needed to react.

Football is the sum of individual, collective, physical and emotional qualities, coaches’ strategy and unforeseen events.

Left-handed and right-handed

Today, almost all teams in Brazil and the world have skillful players and dribblers on the sides. Left-handers work on the right, and right-handers on the left. They dribble to the center, to finish, to pass or to cross the ball towards the goalkeeper. In the past, left-handed wings acted on the left, and right-handed wings on the right. They dribbled to the end line and crossed backwards, towards the teammate who arrived facing the goal. The ideal is to have both options.

I imagine that today’s young people play and train to act with their “shift foot”. When I was a boy, left-handed, I thought about being a left winger. Played dribbling to the bottom line. Over time, I realized that my place was in the middle, where I had a broad view of the game.

For over 20 years, I have criticized the exaggerated and precipitous valorization, in Brazil, of promising, skillful and dribblers young people, who work at the ends. Meanwhile, they have forgotten, for decades, the training of midfielders, builders, thinkers and great passers. They are the soul, body and brain of a team.

Poetry

Between one paragraph and another I write for my column, between one game and another, between one sports program and another, between one walk and another, between one news on general issues and another, between one thought and another, between one vaccine and another , I read and reread some things, poetry, such as that of the young painter and poet from Minas Gerais, Melissa Mundim, from the book “P’Rosa Gallica”.

“The dream in the hands still raw, cutting it is a risk and knowing exactly what one is.”