Corinthians wants to avoid betting so as not to make more mistakes when choosing a coach

By succumbing to pressure from the crowd and firing Sylvinho about a month after the start of the season, Corinthians’ board showed that they had no conviction in the coach’s work. The worst thing for the club, however, is that two weeks after the coach’s fall, the top hats have not defined the profile of the replacement.

In the announcement of the coach’s dismissal, Corinthians president Duilio Monteiro Alves said it was time to make a “course correction”, but apparently he is looking for a deeper change for the team.

Before closing with the former side, the president negotiated with Renato Gaúcho and Diego Aguirre. While the former likes to set up more offensive teams, the latter prefers strong defensive systems. When he failed in the negotiations and without having a clear criterion, he ended up bringing in the inexperienced Sylvinho.

That’s the kind of situation the president wants to avoid this time around. For this, the Corinthians management now has a new idea. The search at the moment is for an experienced name that is foreign, something that both Duilio and his predecessor and godfather at the club, Andrés Sanchez, always refused for the white-and-white association.

Sanchez maintains his conviction and has given interviews saying that he prefers to see a Brazilian coach at Parque São Jorge. The pupil changed his mind recently, according to him, after seeing the success of rivals such as Palmeiras, with Abel Ferreira, and Flamengo, with Jorge Jesus.

“The foreign coaches I talked to in the last year, exchanging general ideas about football, surprised me a lot. I was not adept, favorable, enthusiastic with foreign coaches. But my mind has really changed”, he said in a recent interview with SporTV.

Between investments outside the financial reality, such as the survey made to Jesus, and negotiations that did not go forward, such as Paulo Fonseca, the alvinegra board finds itself in a market without many alternatives, but tries not to resort to a routine expedient in Parque São Jorge in the years, in which the club made a series of bets when choosing its coaches. And none of them have been right for a long time.

The last one was in 2017, when Fábio Carille was raised from assistant to coach. At that time, the professional’s main credentials were his work alongside Mano Menezes and Tite at Corinthians. He was in charge, above all, of improving the defensive system designed by the commanders.

It was with a very organized defensive team that he not only won two titles, the Paulista and the Campeonato Brasileiro that year, but also imprinted a well-defined style on the team: it was a team that knew how to score very well and be surgical in the chances it created in attack. . In this way, he went 34 games unbeaten — in that period, he even spent the entire first round of Nacional without losing.

After that year, however, not even Carille could repeat the pattern he had set. Although he won the State Championship twice more, in 2018, before leaving the club, and in 2019, in his second spell, Corinthians no longer had the same brilliance that it displayed in 2017.

In the last five years, by the way, he started to pile up bets that didn’t work out. The list even includes Carille himself, erased on his return to Parque São Jorge, and coaches such as Osmar Loss, Jair Ventura, Tiago Nunes, Dyego Coelho and Vagner Mancini, in addition to the most recent, Sylvinho. In common, all are still technicians in search of affirmation.

As it invested to reinforce the squad over the last season, especially with the signings of Willian, Róger Guedes, Renato Augusto and Giuliano, also counting on Paulinho, who arrived this year, the Corinthians board now wants an experienced name to extract from the squad. the maximum capacity of the athletes.

In addition, the Corinthians president has plans to sign a contract of at least two years with the new coach, so that his work extends throughout his term.

While he doesn’t find this desired professional, Fernando Lázaro, interim coach, will command the team once again this Wednesday (16), against São Bernardo, at Neo Química Arena, in a duel for the sixth round of the Paulista Championship. It will be his third game ahead of the team in 2022, after winning over Ituano (3-2) and Mirassol (2-1).