Opinion – Walter Casagrande Jr.: Brazil has a decisive week in football and democracy

A super important week is starting in the football scenario and in the political-social context. First I’ll talk about the ball: on Tuesday (9) and Wednesday (10) the Brazilians will compete for places in the semifinals of Libertadores.

We have Flamengo, who, after 2-0 at Neo Química Arena, are clear favorites against Corinthians at Maracanã.

The technical difference between the teams is huge, as the first leg showed. And it remains very high in the current performance of the teams.

Last Saturday, Vítor Pereira’s team played poorly again and drew 1-1 with Avaí, in Floripa, while Dorival’s team beat São Paulo, from Rogério, 2-0, in Sampa.

Now Flamengo is glued to Corinthians, in third, in the Brasileirão, with just three points behind.

Flamengo is the team that plays the best ball at the moment, but, to win the national title, it cannot lose and needs to root for Palmeiras’ stumbling blocks.

It is worth mentioning that Abel Ferreira’s team will have a very difficult confrontation with Cuca’s, at Allianz Parque.

Emotionally, and for playing at home, Verdão is the favorite, but the performance at Mineirão was worrying.

The team was totally dominated by Galo, who only conceded the tie because he was too low when he conceded the first goal, but played much better.

Coaches will have to try to balance this story.

Abel needs to make his team play well and be dominant, as has happened most of the time.

Cuca, on the other hand, needs to recover the emotional level of his team, and he will not be able to get down at any time and in any situation that happens in this game.

We have a very interesting match there.

Well, moving from the ball to the letter on Thursday (11), when the manifesto for Democracy and the Rule of Law will be read at the USP Law School: the document for Brazilian women left me very excited.

I confess that I have ambiguous feelings and sensations.

A part of me is super emotional, excited about the accelerated mobilization that this letter caused, passing the 700 thousand signatures mark at a very fast pace.

This shows how ready we are to defend our democracy with peaceful movements, but sure of what we want. Given the space limitations, I expect to repeat the Vale do Anhangabaú from the April 1984 rally by Direta Já.

And I can speak with authority about that historic moment because I participated in it along with my companions from Corinthian Democracy, Magrão, Wladimir, Juninho and Adilson Monteiro Alves, all the time, witnessing from the platform a sea of ​​people screaming for the right to vote for president.

It was on that day that my friend, partner and (why not?) love, Magrão, Socrates, shouted: “If the Dante de Oliveira amendment passes, I will not leave our country”. By then, he was already expected in Italy by Fiorentina.

It gives me goosebumps just remembering and writing the text. The rest of the story, everyone knows how it went.

But I have another indignant and angry side because after the fall of the dictatorship and the return of our democracy, I never imagined that in the 21st century, precisely in the year 2022, we would have to unite again to defend it against a coward, perverse, liar and your gang.

I wasn’t naive to think that we would live happily ever after, but I was just counting on other kinds of problems.

Inflation, poverty, deforestation, violence have always existed, but never in this proportion. And I was sure that we would fight all this, but not to defend our democracy.

Thankfully, my enthusiastic part is much greater, as is the number of people willing to take to the streets to defend our freedom and break all the lies and hypocrisies of this government.

To finish, I want to show a big lie and contradiction of this president: he says he wants to defend democracy and freedom, but he attacks whoever signed this letter, calling us cock-faced and bad character.

It’s just that I learned through psychology that, in this case, there is an identification of him when he looks in the mirror, because he finds there both the bad character and the tough guy who is exactly himself, the President of the Republic.