Luiz Felipe Scolari, or Big Phil to his fans and detractors alike, looks like Gene Hackman on steroids. And for most of his life he has coached that way as well.
This World Cup voyage, the merriment of which has been added to considerably by Brazil's unexpectedly feeble defending, has been disconcerting for Scolari. A team that scores beautiful goals and gives them away too like garlands? That sort of team was never part of his dream.
Tomorrow morning Scolari, with the stevedore muscle and the perpetually mournful expression, confronts a man from the other end of the football spectrum. Sven-Goran Eriksson sets out his stall as a footballing intellectual, a polyglot comfortable discussing the philosophy and nuance of Danny Mills in several languages. Swallowing the Professor Eriksson routine involves leaving aside a lot of other things, but for the purposes of comparison the cardboard cut-out versions of themselves which both present will do fine.
The irony which ties them together is that neither man's team is playing according to plan. They are succeeding anyway.
Scolari grew up, not juggling grapefruits on Copacobana beach, but trudging about in the rain-swamped region of Rio Grande de Sul. Life there is not one long Nike ad with samba music and swerving footballs. Life there is like life in Cavan. It rains a lot. Pitches are muddy. It's better to be strong than to be quick. Better to be able to defend than to do the silkies.
All that, and Scolari was a centre half. A big, ornery one, too, who cheerily admits that the values of the region silted into his blood. "We had to have a style of play," he says, "which relied more on force and muscle than the rest of the country did."
The Barnsley man has more of a liking for pure football, but there are comparisons between Big Mick and Big Phil. Both Bigs share an abhorrence of the media and a firm belief that they never get a fair shake of the stick. When he was being lobbied from above (the president of Brazil) and from below (the player himself, weeping) to pick Romario for this World Cup, Scolari accepted that he would receive criticism for leaving the little fella behind, "but I don't see how I can get any more criticism than I get already."
If Big Phil had his way, the girl from Ipanema wouldn't have been tall and tan, she'd have been a stocky bruiser with the engine of Roy Keane and the temperament of Ron Harris. He just doesn't get the samba football thing, the beautiful game stuff, the notion of football as performance. Like the mayor of an Albanian town, he has preached unity and pragmatism over and over again. Unity and pragmatism.
His players, though, have left him behind. They have taken a leaf from the book of Luxemburg (Rosa Luxemburg, not their former manager, the delightfully named Wanderly Luxemburgo) and decided that if they can't dance they don't want to be part of the revolution.
So in many respects Brazil are a mess. They beat Costa Rica 5-2 in a match which should have broken scoring records and Big Phil's hard heart. They produced the goods against Belgium, but only because Marc Wilmots had a good goal disallowed and because Scolari took the precaution of at least bringing a decent goalkeeper with him to this tournament.
The Brazilian defence have been screeching at each other like a handful of opera divas, and midfield has been prosaic, but the forwards have been reborn. Rivaldo, never a Brazilian favourite, can't stop scoring, Ronaldo is back to maybe 70 per cent of the player he was, and the career of Ronaldinho is on an upswing again.
And tomorrow morning they face an England side which has abandoned Mr Eriksson's cerebral ways and which plays to traditional English virtues. Big Phil won't like the heat and he won't like the moments of chaos, but he will know that the English will like those things even less, and perhaps his latest discourse on unity and pragmatism can be shelved for a while. Knowing when to keep your mouth shut and go along for the ride is, after all, the essence of pragmatism and the foundation stone of unity.
