It all ended in tears, but in a good way: before travelling to play in Kansas the Toronto FC players cooked up a grand farewell for their on-loan World Cup goalkeeper Júlio César. The Brazilian spent just three months in Canada, starting seven matches, but bonds were quickly formed.
There is an amazing four-minute video of the goodbye on YouTube in which the QPR loanee sobs adorably in front of his short-term team-mates. Vulnerable and immensely likeable, the decorated César blows apart the macho, insensitive image of the successful modern footballer.
You then find that his wife, the Brazilian model and actor Susana Werner, is a former soap opera star.
Which kind of tears will the World Cup bring for Júlio César? It may be a strange circumstance that the World Cup favourites have a goalkeeper who could not get into QPR's Championship side, but the detail fits perfectly into the wider historical narrative of Brazilian net-minders.
This is a role that has attracted mistrust and abuse, myth-making (that all Brazilian goalkeepers are dodgy) and suspicion, its base purpose seemingly counter-intuitive and offensive to the Brazilian spirit of spontaneity and craft.
Street hustler
The foundation stones of Brazil’s reputation in football are two long-held myths, associated with the country’s history of slavery (and subsequent cross-pollination), and its love of the street hustler figure, or
malandro
.
Gilberto Freyre, one of Brazil's great social scientists, wrote in 1938, " Our style of football seems to contrast with the European style because of a set of characteristics such as surprise, craftiness, shrewdness, readiness and I shall say individual brilliance and spontaneity, all of which express our 'mulattoism'."
At the same time, as David Goldblatt puts it in his new book Futebol Nation, "Deeper linkages . . . were being made between Brazilian football and the lifestyle and culture of the malandro. The malandro was a stock figure of Brazilian culture – the hustler, the street smart, an urban warrior living on his wits and his charm."
How can a goalkeeper, whose objectives are denial and prevention, endear himself in such a culture? In Brazil the task is a thankless one, firmly set around the mundane notion of not making mistakes.
Forever playing in a team of favourites in a culture of high expectations and blame, Brazil’s goalkeeper has no access to the possibility of heroism the goalkeeper of a less successful team enjoys.
Claudio Taffarel, a hero in 1994, articulated as much: "In Brazil, you never get fair treatment as a goalkeeper; people are always quick to criticise you and loud in their comments. Until recently, everybody in Brazil only had eyes for the number 10, while it was always the keeper who was responsible if a team lost."
Outsider
The Brazil case is an exaggerated form of the condition Jonathan Wilson describes in his book on goalkeepers,
The Outsider
: “The goalkeeper will have least to do when his side has played best and will be at his best only when the rest of the side has in some way failed. He is like the lifeguard or the fireman, to be thanked in times of crisis even as everybody wonders why the crisis arose in the first place.”
The tragic story of Barbosa, Brazil’s goalkeeper at the 1950 World Cup, casts an equally gloomy shadow over his successors. After letting Ghiggia’s shot sneak inside his near post in the final against Uruguay, Barbosa – one of just three black players on the team – was forever blamed for the defeat, and he eventually died in sadness and poverty. The occasion spawned the idea of a “curse” at the Maracanã but also, in a superstitious culture, the notion that the goalkeeping position itself was jinxed.
A consequence, as Alex Bellos writes, was a change even in language associated with the role to take account of the supernatural:
"A brilliant outfield player is called a craque, a crack player. A brilliant goalkeeper is never a craque. He is referred to as a 'saint'. Great saves are invariably "miraculous"."
Júlio César, now 34, is a former treble winner at Internazionale who can put his practical skills ahead of celestial concerns, yet his club situation creates doubts.
He insists he is “a much better player than four years ago”, when his error contributed to Brazil’s elimination by the Netherlands, and he plays behind a solid defence. But will he be sharp enough when his big test arrives? It’s Brazil’s number one concern.
