It’s been 20 years since Brazil beat a European team in the knockout stages of the World Cup, but they’re the favourites to win this year.
As everybody knows, the best World Cup is the one that falls closest to your tenth birthday, and for me that was 1982. My early experience of the game that it was a grey game played on dark brown pitches by teams that got covered in mud within the first ten minutes, a world in which whacking the ball unceremoniously out of the ground was greeted with as much applause as a defence-splitting through-ball, and matches played in half-empty grounds in front of frequently sullen (and occasionally violent) crowds.
In comparison with this, the 1982 World Cup finals in Spain were an assault on the senses. The over-saturated colours of Spanish television and the sound of air horns and muffled commentary, often struggling to be heard over the noise of the crowd. And both the most over-saturated and noisiest team of all was Brazil. They were good. Everybody knew that. But they were also unknown. Of the 24-player squad, only two played in Europe, and one of those, Dirceu of Atletico Madrid, was a squad player rather than a starter.
The other one, Eder, played for Roma and was a known name. But the amount of football that most people in Britain had actually seen of the rest of say, Zico, Socrates, Eder, or Serginho, was very little indeed. When they were knocked out by Italy in the second group stage, beaten in 3-2 in a match they only needed to draw to qualify from, it did feel as though the heart of the tournament had been ripped from it. The Brazil men’s international team has never quite been the same since, despite two World Cup wins in the 40 years since.
🇧🇷 Forty years ago tonight Éder scored this 88th-minute winner against the Soviet Union in Brazil’s opening match of the 1982 World Cup in Seville. This is probably in my top three favourite World Cup goals. BBC commentary by Barry Davies. pic.twitter.com/mi2Ujtt6TK
— James Campbell Taylor (@jamestaylor) June 14, 2022
The last of those came 20 years ago. The 2002 World Cup was a curious affair in which surprise results throughout the tournament opened the knockout stages up. France, Portugal, Argentina and Croatia all fell in the first round, Italy in the second, and Spain in the quarter-finals. But Brazil chugged past Turkey, Costa Rica and China in the group stage, the only team to record maximum points, and then past England in the quarter-finals…
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