NEW DELHI, April 24: Tele Santana, who died aged 74 in Brazil on Friday, presided over one of the most exciting football teams in history. He didn't believe in tactics, he tutored nothing.
Tele Santana looked over a starstudded football team in the manner most benign. In today's time, the alarm bells would have gone off in an instant. If there was the calmest way to direct a team, Santana did with the Brazilian team of 1982.
It is almost impossible to understand a team outright favourites to win a World Cup, and for many, the most talented ever would not suffer from egos, jealousies, personal ambition and rivalries within the squad.
The World Cup is littered with such stories, but there was a certain kind of serenity about the tall, bearded, philosopher-looking, Left-leaning, cigarette-loving Socrates, Santana's captain, and his team, that didn’t seem to belong to football of that time, and before or after.
You only have to look at the one moment in the classic quarterfinal encounter between Brazil and France at Mexico 86, which was to eventually prove defining, to understand what Santana's sorcerers were all about. The absence, not lack, of ambition came out in all its splendour. Back then, it was alright.
Twenty minutes to go and with the scores level, Zico Coimbra had just come on and Brazil earned a penalty. Socrates, the silent, undisputed lord and master of the team, stood imperiously over the ball ready to kill off the encounter. But who steps up, instead, asking to take it? Zico, the ageing jewel of a sparkling side, despite hardly touching the ball.
And so what happens? Socrates simply steps aside, even encouraging Zico with a polite wave of the hand towards the waiting ball. There is no rancour, no dark look. Just rare mutual respect. Even at such a crucial juncture, Santana, on the sidelines was not even consulted. He knew his team comprised talented, mature men capable of taking their decisions and risks.
Of course, we all know Zico missed and Brazil were eventually knocked out.
No one complained. There was just a little melancholy at the passing of a brilliant team and their manager into history. The world knew that this was not even their finest hour. That had come four years earlier.
The unhurried, timeless quality that the Brazil of 82 brought to their football has never been felt since. If ever a team fit Pele's succinct observation of football being the beautiful game, it was this one.
One which Tele Santana seemed to have fused into a brilliant — beautiful, that's the word really — unit in almost no time. It didn't harm matters that he was helped by a generation of footballers — a most unlikely bunch, physically, but superb athletes, still — that even Brazil, the assembly line of footballing talent, has found hard to match.
Alex Bellos puts it very aptly in his book, Futebol, The Brazilian Way of Life, "In 1982, Brazil were Braziiiil; they looked like they played for pure enjoyment." Socrates and his men didn't even seem to run. They strolled.
Santana may or may not have been a brilliant tactician as a manager. That strangely will never emerge, because his team never seemed to bank on tactics or strategy. Playing the game was more important than winning it. It is unlikely he would figure in any list of revolutionary coaches or managers who left their mark on the game, but that he would be very fondly regarded is beyond any doubt.
Santana's philosophy was simple. Attack. He preferred to lose than not attack and win. In time, in Brazil too, he and his ideas would be isolated. But when he could help it, attack was what Zico, Socrates, Eder, Falcao, Junior Cerezo and Serginho did for him and so breathtakingly at that.
It is said that had Careca been discovered four years earlier, Brazil would have won in 1982. Socrates and Co. made all the patterns, but there was no striker to put in the finishing touch. At Mexico, Careca was in his prime, but the magicians had aged.
Part of the romance that surrounds Santana's team is that it never won anything. There is a sense of unfulfilment that always accompanies any discussion of this generation of Brazilians.
Carlos Alberto Parreira led Brazil to their first title after 24 fruitless years by beating Italy at the 1994 final, but that team which did so much to redeem a sinking sport in Brazil and lifting the gloom following F1 champion Aryton Senna's death still finds itself being hailed very grudgingly because they won by playing defensively.
http://sport.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1507039.cms
AuthorTopic: Black magic man: Tele Santana. (Read 336 times)
July 02, 2006, 04:10:23 PM