Rio de Janeiro, May 16: Brazilian fans’ legendary passion will play a key role as their team seeks to win the World Cup on home soil, but their notoriously high expectations will also put enormous pressure on the ‘selecao’.
Brazilians take huge pride in their nation’s unparalleled five World Cup wins, and their rabid support will be palpable when Brazil start the tournament against Croatia on June 12.
Hosting the Cup is tinged with the bitter memory of 1950, the last time it was held in the country, when Uruguay beat Brazil 2-1 in the deciding game in their own house to win the title.
That humiliation unleashed what Nelson Rodrigues, one of the country’s foremost playwrights and a beloved sportswriter, called the “mutt complex,” a national feeling of inferiority that he said bled into the very fabric of Brazilian identity.
Brazilians will be expecting the national side — which Rodrigues called “the motherland in football boots” — to right that wrong this time around.
Over the past four years, the average Brazilian fan has gone from abject pessimism over the team’s chances to absolute confidence that they will win a sixth World Cup.
Brazil’s victory in the Confederations Cup, last year’s World Cup warm-up tournament, helped revive the fans’ love of their team.
The ‘selecao’ drubbed Spain 3-0 in the final, redeeming themselves in the Maracana stadium — the scene of the 1950 humiliation — and winning back some bragging rights over the current World Cup holders, whose recent success has damaged Brazilians’ self-image as the world’s greatest football nation.
The crowd, which saturated the stadium in green and yellow and kept belting out the national anthem long after the music was over, undoubtedly played a part in Brazil’s emphatic win.
“The champion is back!” they chanted when captain Thiago Silva lifted the trophy.
The World Cup will only fire the fans up further. (AGENCIES)
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