NEWS OF the death of Socrates, the sublimely elegant midfield player, who succumbed yesterday at the age of 57 to complications following treatment for food poisoning in a Sao Paulo hospital, evokes memories of a day in Barcelona in 1982 when, with a single stroke of his boot, he seemed to have eased Brazil towards another World Cup final.
Socrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira had almost enough names for an entire football team, and as much talent as most teams put together. No footballer, not even Diego Maradona or Eric Cantona, cut a more identifiable figure than the tall, handsome, bearded, wonderfully languid figure who was one of the few Brazilians of his era to rise from the middle classes to the national side and who gave commentators a chance to point out he was a qualified doctor.
Few players have ever moved around the pitch with such a frictionless, understated grace. Three inches over 6ft, long-legged and skinny in his prime, Socrates nudged the ball and stroked it and, above all, backheeled it until the geometry of the game had arranged itself to his satisfaction.
But his effort was not enough to take Brazil all the way in that sunlit summer of 1982. The shot that beat Dino Zoff at his near post in the 12th minute equalised an early opening goal from Paolo Rossi, but it was the Italians who prevailed 3-2 in the Sarria stadium and went on to the lift the trophy.
In Brazil and around the world, millions mourned the departure of the side Socrates captained and which had seemed to embody so much of his country’s unique gift to the game. Along with the 1954 Hungarians, they became known as the best team never to have won the World Cup.
The captain was the fulcrum, the inventor and facilitator, as Gerson, a fellow heavy smoker, had been in the great 1970 team. But whereas Gerson was a craftsman, fashioning beauty from solid matter, Socrates was a painter at his easel, summoning beauty from his imagination.
That 1982 team are remembered for their extraordinary, almost excessive profusion of midfield talent. Alongside Socrates were the heavenly skills and furious shot of Zico, the sumptuous poise of Paulo Roberto Falcao and the drive of Toninho Cerezo. This being Brazil, there were other decent players, notably Junior, the dynamic left back, and Eder, a second striker, who took the eye as Brazil swept past the Soviet Union, Scotland and New Zealand in the group phase.
They continued their progress in the second round with a 3-1 win over Maradona’s Argentina but then fell to Rossi’s hat-trick as their limitations – a poor defence and, in Serginho, a third-rate main striker – got the better of them.
Tele Santana, the coach, had to take the blame, although only the harshest of judges would condemn a man who sent out his team with the intention of enjoying themselves and enrapturing the spectators. He was cherished for attempting to exalt the flair and restore the lustre of the Brazilian game, prioritising a luxuriant athleticism over sheer physical effort, and Socrates was his general on the pitch.
The son of a father who named two more of his sons, Sofocles and Sostenes, after famous Greeks from antiquity, during his time with Corinthians in Sao Paulo he organised the players into a sort of workers’ collective. He addressed political rallies and, as Brazil’s detested military dictatorship began to crumble, arranged for the team to wear a slogan exhorting fans to vote in the 1982 elections.
But Socrates was a man of substance as well as gesture. “He managed to politicise football in Brazil as no one has ever done,” Alex Bellos wrote in Futebol, his marvellous survey of the game in Brazil. A man, too, who liked a drink, a smoke and a chat: a hero to nonconformists and romantics everywhere.
Guardian Service
