AT A GLANCE: Brazil

by FOXSports.com

Updated: May 15, 2002, 11:54 AM EST

G Marcos, Palmeiras (BRA)
D Roberto Carlos, Real Madrid (ESP)
D Roque Junior, AC Milan (ITA)
D Lucio, Bayer Leverkusen (GER)
D Belletti, Sao Paulo (BRA)
D Edmilson, Lyon (FRA)
M Juninho, Flamengo (BRA)
M Emerson, Roma (ITA)
M Luizao, Gremio (BRA)
F Ronaldo, Inter Milan (ITA)
F Rivaldo, Barcelona (ESP)

STRUGGLING BRAZIL HANDED AN EASY START

For a short while in 2001, as their national team suffered one humiliating defeat on top of another and their internal game was rocked by scandal, it appeared as if Brazilian football was falling apart.

In losing six of their eighteen qualifying matches, they came perilously close to missing the World Cup finals for the first time ever in their history.

The four times world champions, who have acted in recent years as if the game was invented for them and them alone, looked set to get the ultimate comeuppance.

Eventually they turned it round, but who knows what damaging effects their turbulent qualifying campaign has had. In a three game run last summer, they lost to Ecuador and Uruguay and drew at home with lowly Peru.

They went to the Copa America, and were humbled in the quarter-finals by tiny Honduras. At the Confederations Cup they lost to South Korea. They used over sixty players in the qualifiers, and four coaches.

Put simply, all confidence in the national team has been destroyed and Brazil are a shambles. What many of their zealous fans hate most is the brand of negative, bruising football the team now resort to, which would have the likes of Garrincha and the recently departed Vava spinning in their graves.

Brazils squad will contain many familiar faces. Roberto Carlos and Cafu still have first option on the full-back slots, whilst Denilson of Real Betis, a real throwback to the good old days, is likely to be used as an impact player from the substitutes bench.

Juninho, once of Middlesborough but now flourishing back at Vasco de Gama, is perhaps the only creative option in midfield, a sad sign of the times.

Champions League strikers Elber (Bayern Munich) and Ronaldinho (Paris SG) will be looking to grab the two striking positions, although both have under-performed for the national team that has constantly been chopped and changed. Scolari also has many players around his squad more adept at stopping the opposition playing rather than actually playing themselves, such as Lucio and Belletti in defence and the often brutal Emerson of Roma in central midfield.

All of Brazil?s hopes this summer seem to rest yet again on the two R?s ? Rivaldo and Ronaldo.

Rivaldo is often sublime for Barcelona yet subdued for Brazil, which has more than once caused the fans to get on his back. However he is still one of that elite group of maybe four or five players who are on a different plateau to everyone else in the game. He is a matchwinner, and Brazil will accomplish nothing without him.

Ronaldo has returned, although he is still unfit and didn't win a regular place at Inter Milan before the end of the season. Has he the capacity to cope with those intense thirty days in June?

He is being billed as the man who will come back to save Brazil from their sorrows, which is ridiculous and unrealistic, and reminiscent of the pressure which humbled him at France 98.

All told, incumbent coach Luiz Felipe Scolari appears to have quite a task on his hands to mold Brazil into anything like contenders for Korea/Japan 2002. Fate however has dealt Brazil a kind hand, putting them in a group alongside Turkey, China and Costa Rica. Even in their current state, Brazil can surely negotiate that.

In the second round they will face any one of either Russia, Tunisia, Japan and Belgium, so their chances of making the quarter-finals look excellent. As we have seen many times, lady luck can be a most useful ally indeed.

So we will not see the Brazil of memory at this World Cup. They were built up to be a team of supermen at the last World Cup, where they looked better on their TV adverts than they did on the actual pitch.

The draw may have been kind to them this time around, but Brazil will be in real trouble the moment they face a halfway decent team.

There will be no glorious victory as in 1958, 1962, 1970 and 1994, nor will there be the satisfaction of a moral victory for playing the best football, as in 1982. As Scolari will be all too aware, that is just not good enough

Courtesy of our friends at World Cup Archive