Kolkata is doing her best annual impersonation of Venice. The man has waited for the rain to relent. It doesn’t. He steps out anyway. The antiquated raincoat is perfectly at home with the city’s anachronism. With the obeisance of a pallbearer performing one final duty, he unties the knots. The flag — hoisted with pride four weeks ago — feels heavier than usual, drenched as much by monsoon as by another unrealised dream. The quadrennial tradition reaches its melancholy conclusion. Brazil are out of the FIFA World Cup. The wait extends.
Nearly a thousand miles away, I find myself performing the same ritual in Noida, only with less urgency. Intoxicated by a concoction of corporate and capital, seldom does this city pause to breathe for football. I am spared the footballing duopoly of Kolkata, and the jeers that inevitably follow when a Brazil exit coincides with an Argentina triumph. I am spared the indignity of eschewing Lionel Messi loyalists at the tea stalls after their late comeback against Egypt. Except, there is an invisible thread that connects the two cities — the hurt feels exactly as unendurable.
Where I grew up, football teams were not chosen. They were inherited as family heirlooms. The generation before ours witnessed two revolutions in quick succession. First came globalisation. Then came Brazil. Brazil no longer travelled through imagined anecdotes. They travelled into the living rooms. Before Arun Govil taught divinity, Zico and Socrates had already cast their spell. Before Shaktimaan, Romario was the closest personification of a superhero. Brazil were not loved because they won. They were loved because they brought joy.
Notice the use of the past tense. The Brazil we grew up venerating bears little resemblance to the one that arrived in the USA. The flamboyance has made way for the formulaic. Perhaps this is precisely why they lost to Norway.
Amused by Brazil’s performance, or the abject lack of it, Zlatan Ibrahimovic would assert Norway looked more Joga Bonito than Brazil. It wasn’t hyperbole. Carlo Ancelotti’s team had only 34 per cent possession in the round of 16 match — their lowest-ever in an unparalleled World Cup history spanning 119 matches and five trophies. They had fewer shots on target, completed fewer passes, and, save for the two penalties, had a lesser xG (expected goals).
There is a lesson in sociology here. For the Indian working class, who grew up far removed from Rio’s beaches and Sao Paulo’s streets, Brazil represented something much larger than merely football. Nothing paralysed us quite like the tyranny of “what if”. What if we fail at the impending examinations looming large? What if we cannot articulate ourselves in the job interview? What if we don’t live up to the societal expectations we had very little control over? What if the letter that we wrote to express our love, with trembling hands, is met with soul-crushing rejection?
For generations, they played football as though failure was an acceptable price for beauty. They taught us that life need not be negotiated in binaries of victory and defeat. Lose, if you must, but lose on your terms. Brazil’s greatest export was not the footballers, but the spirit of joie de vivre. They don’t radiate joy anymore.
For perhaps the first time in living memory, Brazil leave a World Cup having surrendered not merely a match, but the very idea that made the world fall in love with them. They were timid. Predictable. Forgettable. The greater concern is that this was no aberration.
Brazil were equally unexceptional against Morocco and Japan in this edition, and in most of the matches of the previous three editions.
And yet, four years from now, another June will arrive. Another father will climb onto a porch to fasten a Brazil flag. Another child will be curious to hear stories about Neymar. Not what he won — of which, there is very little — but his rainbow flicks. The rabonas. The Paradinhas. The elasticos. The flashiness. The dancing feet that made millions fall in love with the team representing a nation they would never visit.
That is Brazil’s true inheritance. Not the five stars stitched on the shirt, but a brand of football so unapologetically different that we grew up believing nobody else had the right to play football that way.
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