SIDDHARTH SAXENA
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
NEW DELHI: There's something very un-Brazilian about Dida. And it doesn't have much to do with the more apparent aspect of his being the oddball in their milieu a backbencher in a finishing school for brilliant front men.
Out there, everybody wants to be a striker, scoring goals beautifully and happily; the goalkeeper is mostly perceived as a necessary evil. Maybe that's why he forever has that stern, sullen, out-of-place look.
Then there's Dida himself. Unlike the rest of the Brazilian team who are grinning while scoring goals, and grinning while not scoring them, he smiles very little. All his worries and doubts are camouflaged behind the strong, silent exterior. His form this season for AC Milan has probably only added more worry lines to his expressionless face, but you would be hard-pressed to spot any.
Despite being Carlos Parreira's first choice goalkeeper, Dida goes into the World Cup riding on uncertain club form. It was this fear that probably brought out his splendid and face-saving performance against Barcelona in the Champions League semifinal a few nights ago.
Dida has to fight off challenges for the No. 1 spot from the two Brazil-based keepers, Marcos and Rogerio Ceni, and most notably, his crosstown rival at Inter, the prodigious Julio Cesar.
Dida carries another burden. A huge sociological one. This one involves a complex issue of race and prejudice, one which you would scarcely imagine in the Brazilian context. It was pointed out when Dida made his Brazil debut in 1999 itself: he was the first black goalkeeper since Moacyr Barbosa in 1950. That immediately set the alarm bells ringing. The jinx was back.
If ever there is a scapegoat in Brazilian sport, it was Barbosa. By the time he died, lonely almost penniless in 2000, he was broken by the constant scorn and guilt poured on him, of being responsible for the defeat at home in the 1950 final against Uruguay.
"Under Brazilian law the maximum sentence is 30 years. But my imprisonment has been for 50. I've been paying for a crime I did not commit," he used to say.
Barbosa was black. All of Dida's rivals for the No. 1 spot for Germany are white or of mixed race. It is a telling statement that while goalkeeping has always been the weak link in Brazilian line-ups since 1950, still all of them have been white — Felix in 1970, Carlos in 1982-86 and Taffarell in the 90s.
In his wonderful study, Football, A Sociology of the Global Game, Richard Giulianotti touches upon this paradox. According to him, Brazil's white elite resisted football's organised dissipation among the black population.
"The national side continued to exclude black players... Brazil's shock defeat in the 1950 World Cup finals has been commonly blamed on black players, especially their goalkeeper."
Giulianotti further points out that Brazilian sides still favour white goalkeepers, through their 'racial' characteristics of reliability and rationality. Despite black players being the key players in the ensuing decades, "white middle-class hegemony over football's powerful positions was reasserted," he argues.
Apart from Barbosa, Bigode and Juvenal were also held responsible for that defeat. They too were black. Ironically, Barbosa was voted the best goalkeeper of the tournament. But, after the final, he would forever remain a pariah. He was to play only one more match for Brazil again. If ever there was a Brazilian culture shock, to employ a cruel pun, it was the unexpected final defeat at the newly-constructed Maracana.
Nothing comes close. F1 genius, Aryton Senna's death in 1994, 44 years later only adds to an enduring idea of sport-related grief. Officially, there were 175,850 Brazilians in the stadium that day history's largest recorded gathering for a football match.
For a young, hopeful people, where football was proving a powerful vehicle for nation building, Maracana, the world's largest stadium, instantly became the world's biggest funeral site.
Like before the 1950 final, this Brazilian side too, is powerful enough to understand the burden of history. Maybe rightfully so, but if all happens to go wrong, who will be blamed? Dida carries an unenviable legacy.
http://sport.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1510559.cms
AuthorTopic: Dida and the curse of 1950 (Read 188 times)
May 01, 2006, 06:29:35 AM