Opinion – Tostão: What is most lacking when Brazilians face Europeans is individual talent

When does the pre-season end? While the coaches of Brazilian teams experiment with players and tactics, the layoffs of coaches continue. Impatience seems to have increased. It’s schizophrenic football. Fans protest in the stands and on social networks, the press has a lot of repercussion, as it gives audience, and clubs fire. Who are the opinion leaders? There are controversies.

The pre-season should also be a time for the sports chronicle, including myself, to evolve, to forget the clichés and ready-made comments, to stop deifying the brilliant ones, to exalt the coaches in the victories and massacre them in the defeats, as if they were the game stars.

The experience of the trainers is necessary, however, it can be disputed. Filipe Luís has played for Flamengo as a third defender on the left. He is very good at the ball out of the defense, but one of Flamengo’s main qualities in recent years has been Filipe Luís playing as a point guard, almost always in the opponent’s field, even more so as the team pressed to recover the ball close to the goal. Filipe Luís always builds good plays, with lucidity and accurate passes.

At Atlético, Flamengo’s opponent on Sunday (20), for the Supercup, the coach “El Turco” Mohamed has been more pragmatic, restrained, in maintaining the way of playing, the lineup and the variations used by Cuca.

At Botafogo, the surprise was the dismissal of coach Enderson Moreira, after the team won the Serie B title. The club’s new owner, American John Textor, claimed that the team has not played in the style programmed by the club-company. Strange! Is the businessman a great expert in football strategy or does he think that the game is a succession of mathematical operations?

At Cruzeiro, Ronaldo, the club’s owner, and the fans are delighted with the new coach, the young Uruguayan Paulo Pezzolano. The new team has been vibrant, organized, with a lot of physical strength and good individual quality for a Serie B team. But it’s still too early to make predictions. The transformation into a club-company, the victories, the departure of Marcelo Moreno, who earned a lot and played little, the expulsion of the former president from the club’s social boards and the criminal proceedings that are running in court against some leaders encourage fans that things will get better, on and off the field.

Who has already passed through the pre-season is Palmeiras. After the decision of the Club World Cup title, it was doubtful whether Abel Ferreira exaggerated in defensive care, putting forward Rony on the right, to mark the Chelsea winger.

Some people who want to be more romantic than romanticism adopt the outdated speech that Brazilian players, like those of Palmeiras, are exaggeratedly repressed by the coaches’ tactical scheme and that the solution would be to go back to the past, to the roots, and try to play football. with more freedom, with more dribbles and improvisations, as if it were a ball game.

What Brazilian teams lack most when facing Europeans is, above all, more individual talent, as the best Brazilian players work in Europe. Among selections, inferiority is less or non-existent, although Europeans, increasingly, form great stars.

The big surprise in the decisions of the last Club World Cup is the fact that the Europeans, so superior individually, have great difficulties to beat the South American champions.