Wilson Piazza – The Ball Thief

Name: Wilson Oliveira Piazza

Born: February 25, 1943, Ribeirao Das Neves, Minas Gerais

First Professional Club: Esporte Clube Renascenca, Belo Horizonte

 

Wilson Piazza – The Ball Thief

Wilson Oliveira Piazza was born in the town of Ribeirao Das Neves, Minas Gerais, on 25 February 1943, the son of Jose Piazza and Regina Da Silva Piazza.

He describes his childhood as an unremarkable one. His family were modestly comfortable. Piazza was an average student but left school at fifteen for an office job at a tyre company on the Avenida Antonio Carlos. The company had its own football team where he quickly shone.

Piazza was bright and acutely ambitious. He landed a job as a clerk at Banco Mercantil De Minas Gerais and for a while looked set for a commercial career. His true passion, however, was football: ‘I wanted to be a professional. Even if I had to play in the worst team in the world, I knew I had to make that dream come true.’

For a time he juggled his two lives, playing football every morning until midday then working at the bank from 1 p.m. until 9 p.m. – or later. Piazza’s job was to balance the bank’s books at the close of business each day. Some days the figures fitted, some days they did not. ‘We could not go home if there was a cruzeiro difference. Sometimes we were there until 11 p.m. or midnight. Once I didn’t go home at all and slept in the bank.’ He remained at the bank until he was twenty-three and able to live full time off his football. By then he had already emerged as an international in the making.

He was eighteen when he was offered a place as a junior at Esporte Clube Renascença. Though unimposing physically, his determination and intelligence as a ball-winning, creative midfielder soon established him as one of the rising stars in Belo Horizonte. His breakthrough came three years later, when he was transferred to Cruzeiro, a club about to put Mineiro football on the map.

Since the so-called Brazilian National Championship had begun in 1950, the trophy had never left the big two cities, Rio and Sao Paulo – hardly surprising since it was not open to sides from other states. It would not be until 1971 that a Mineiro side, Atletico, would win a genuinely pan-Brazilian title. Equally the international side was almost exclusively made up of players from the big city clubs.

Cruzeiro announced their arrival in 1965, when Belo Horizonte’s 110,000 capacity Minerao stadium was opened. They beat Santos, and Pelé, 4–3 in a specially arranged match. A year later they beat Brazil’s reigning kings of club football again, this time lifting the Copa Brazil, the nearest to a truly national title, as they did so. Mineiro football was on the map at last.
In 1966, Piazza’s clubmate Tostao would be the first player from a Mineiro side to break into the national XI. Where he led, Piazza and other stars like Dirceu and Natal, and later Fontana and Dario, would follow.

Much like Santos, Cruzeiro were bonded by a tight-knit, brotherly atmosphere within the club. The directors’ policy of selecting almost exclusively Mineiro players only deepened their devotion to the Cruzeiro cause. ‘There was only one player, Raul, who was not Mineiro. So that team in the 1960s was like a family,’ Piazza explains.

In the wake of 1966, the national squad was forced to cast its net wider in its search for players capable of making up for the disgrace. Piazza joined Tostao in the first Brazilian national squad assembled post-England under Aimore Moreira in 1967. By the qualification matches in 1969, he had formed a powerful midfield partnership with Gérson. Piazza’s intelligence and tenacity looked the perfect complement to Gérson’s visionary distribution. His nickname at Cruzeiro was ladrao de bola, the ball thief. He supplied the bombardier’s bullets.

The energetic young Clodoaldo’s emergence at the end of Saldanha’s reign had, however, offered Zagalo an even stronger option. When a switch to the centre of defence was suggested after Carlos Alberto, Gérson and Pelé’s Rio summit on the eve of the Austria match, Piazza had been reluctant. ‘I was a combative player, I liked to be in the action in the middle of the pitch. Suddenly I found myself stuck at the back,’ he says. A natural all-rounder, he made the transition comfortably enough in the match against Austria. Yet as Zagalo stuck with the idea of using him as a defender, he felt like a square peg alongside Carlos Alberto and Brito. ‘I was used to giving more of myself. At the end of the game it seemed as if I hadn’t played, my shirt wasn’t wet,’ he says. Piazza found himself repeating the phrase the cachaça-hazed Garrincha made infamous: ‘Is it the end?’

He was, of course, not alone in playing out of position. With the exception of the defence, almost the entire midfield and attack was learning to adapt to a sometimes radical change in their position. To the Brazilian public, however, Piazza’s new role seemed the most dramatic conversion since St Paul. It became one of the dominant debates in the press in the days after the squad’s departure. Even his mother chimed in with a plea to Zagalo that her boy be restored to his rightful position in midfield.

Piazza’s greatest fear was that he would not be able to compete with the Europeans’ long-ball game. ‘We called it the jogo aereo, the air game. I am 1.66 metres (around 5ft 10in) so I thought, “Oh my God, I’m here in the World Cup and they play the jogo aereo, they will do what they want”.’ Zagalo, however, remained convinced that with Clodoaldo and Piazza, he had the sheet anchors he needed to allow Gérson and Rivellino to play.

Piazza’s calming, Mineiro influence would prove priceless in the weeks to come. On the eve of the opening match it deserted him, however. He recalls spending the night before the Czech match playing a card game, caxeta, with Carlos Alberto long into the night. ‘After months of training you are anxious to begin. I was very nervous, like a bull.’ The opening moments of his World Cup did little to ease his anxiety.

Piazza remembers feeling dazed after Petras’ early goal. ‘It was like if you were punched, not by Mike Tyson, but by a lightweight,’ he says.

As Rivellino, Pelé and Jairzinho laid the foundation for a memorable opening win, Piazza felt the nervousness lift. He admits it never returned to haunt him again during the campaign. ‘I was scared because I was so relaxed,’ he smiles. Such composure was a rare commodity in a team that reflected the breadth of Brazil’s colourful, regional character. ‘The Carioca is more extroverted, he thinks he is the best, he jokes more,’ explains Piazza. ‘The Paulista is more hard-working, more conscious about being professional, maybe because in the big city people don’t have time to complain, it’s only work, work, work. The Mineiro is shy, more hospitable, communicative, they listen more.’

There were moments when the mild-mannered Mineiro influence of Pelé – a son of Minas by dint of his birth in Três Coraçoes – Tostao and himself saved the side from over-confidence, he believes. In the immediate aftermath of the opening 4–1 win the atmosphere in the dressing room had been euphoric. As far as some of the players were concerned, the Cup was as good as in Carlos Alberto’s hands. It was Pelé who moored the more excitable temperaments with a little Mineiro wisdom.

‘Pelé clapped his hands and made a short speech. He said: “It was good, but we must improve”. Then he sat beside me. He knew what kind of person I was. He told me: “Piazza, if we don’t say this there will be guys who will think that we are already champions”.’ Like his fellow Mineiro, Piazza knew there was no smoke until they saw the fire. ‘It was Mineiro precaution. He was saying, take care.’

If England exposed any defensive deficiencies in Piazza’s game, they centred not on his lack of height but his lack of a grounding in the game’s black arts. He would never claim to have been an angel. If his memory serves him, he was sent off five times, but always for complaining to referees. As far as he is concerned, his nickname says everything about the way he played. The man was never the ball thief’s target. ‘I did not kick people,’ he says simply.

In the aftermath of Lee’s kick on Félix, Piazza had been asked to exact retribution. ‘Carlos Alberto said: “We must stop this guy”. I told him: “I’m not going to do anything”.’ Piazza had his own welfare in mind. ‘I knew that if I did I would be punished because I never knew how to kick anybody. If you don’t know how to do something and you try, it becomes ridiculous.’ Carlos Alberto was left to mete out justice instead.

Piazza says he enjoyed the England match more than any other. ‘I like a game that demands attention all the time,’ he says. When I suggest he left the pitch that day with his first sweat-drenched shirt of the tournament he smiles. ‘Yes, it was a good game.’

Piazza reverted to his old midfield role against Rumania. ‘I played in Clodoaldo’s position, Fontana replaced me as a fourth zagueiro,’ he says. His energetic intelligence shone through as he linked well with his clubmate Tostao and Paulo Cézar. The win deepened his confidence that even without their stars, Brazil were a force to be reckoned with. ‘You cannot be restricted to eleven players. You must have a well-formed group,’ he explains. ‘We won without Gérson and Rivellino. That was important.’

Piazza shared a room with his Cruzeiro team-mate Tostao. The two men were friends at Cruzeiro and socialized with their wives, Margot and Vania. ‘Our friendship went beyond the four lines of the pitch,’ he says. If Piazza had always been an unusually talkative Mineiro, Tostao had not. He preferred not to talk too long to friends as well as strangers. Piazza knew his friend well enough to cope with the silences. ‘Sometimes I spoke to the walls,’ he smiles. ‘Or I went to other rooms. But I was used to Tostao.’

The press offered another alternative, of course. Piazza was among the older, wiser heads free to talk to the journalists allowed into the Suites Caribes. With Gérson and Carlos Alberto he presented a defiant voice. ‘We cannot repeat 1966,’ he had said in one interview. ‘The Brazilian people do not deserve that again, despite the fact that they didn’t support us. The people do not deserve defeat.’

Like every other player, he concedes they came closest to defeat against the old enemy Uruguay. Of all the Brazilian side, Piazza was the most painfully aware of the brutality he was about to face in the semi-final. He recalls, to the day, his introduction to the Uruguayan school of macho football. ‘The twelth of June 1968, that is when I broke my leg at the Maracana playing against Uruguay,’ he says. ‘I admire Uruguay, besides they are bold, brave. If they want to fight with you they fight in your home, in their home. Their game is not like the Argentinian, that is more like Brazil, more technique; Uruguay use more force.’
He admits that he – and his side – played badly in the first half. Like Félix, he is still not willing to take the blame for the blunder that induced 110 million missed heartbeats. He says it was a mistake by Brito that forced him out wide to cover Cubilla. He did not dive in with a tackle because he was sure he could force the attacker further away from the goal by staying on his feet. Like Félix he wishes Cubilla had connected cleanly. ‘It was a bad shot,’ he says. When he hears Félix’s explanation about the pitch markings, he cannot but arch an eyebrow and smile: ‘I thought the pitch was perfect.’

Returning to his boxing analogy, he nods when I ask him whether Cubilla’s goal was the closest thing Brazil encountered to a Mike Tyson punch. ‘Yes,’ he says. Yet by the time the team had dragged itself back from the edge of disaster and triumphed, Piazza’s inner confidence had reached its zenith. ‘When we won that game against Uruguay, I lay in bed that night and thought “We are the champions”,’ he says simply.

Tostao, who filled this role so effectively in the 1970 World Cup

Name: Eduardo Goncalvez de Andrade

Born: January 25, 1947, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais

First Professional Club: America (Belo Horizonte)

Tostao: The Little Coin

Eduardo Goncalvez de Andrade was born in Belo Horizonte on 25 January 1947.

‘Aquarius,’ he smiles as he pours coffee from the silver pot his empregada, or housemaid, has placed on the table for him. ‘I am a very rational person, I analyse things and come to rational conclusions. At the same time I am a critical person, ironic, very quiet, introverted. I speak a little but I don’t keep quiet,’ he sums up with a sagacious nod.

Eduardo’s family was middle class, his father worked in a bank in Belo Horizonte and played amateur football for one of the city’s clubs, América. He passed on his love to all four Gonçalvez brothers. ‘I grew up in a passionate football atmosphere,’ recalls Eduardo.

Eduardo was the shortest of the brothers, but even as a seven-year-old he stood out. Soon he had been christened Tostao, the little coin. Unlike Pelé, he must have liked the name. There are no stories of psychological wounds, only an apologetic smile. ‘I can’t remember when and why it started.’

By the time he was fourteen, Tostao was playing junior football for Cruzeiro. By the age of sixteen he had signed professional terms at América – his father was no longer on the books. As he passed through his apprenticeship Tosta^·o found time to keep his head in his books. ‘I had cultural notions, I liked to read, I liked to study,’ he says.

At eighteen, marked out as what he calls a grande promessa, Tostao had to choose the direction his life was to take. Until then his opinion of football as a profession had been characteristically white-collar. ‘Football was like a paid entertainment,’ he says. Blessed with intelligence and a sense of his own God-given ability, he opted to leave his studies, at least for a few years. ‘It was worthwhile because I had everything to be a great player. I was aware that it would be for a short time and my future life would be different,’ he says.

A natural goalscoring centre-forward, Tostao quickly emerged as the great meteor of the Brazilian game. His intelligence and all-round ability was soon winning him comparisons with Pelé. In 1966 he was called up to the Brazilian squad as the King’s prince in waiting. At nineteen, he was little over half the age of some of Feola’s veteran squad.

He made his World Cup debut as replacement for Pelé in the Hungary match. His baptism was memorable for the explosive left-footshot he fired past the Hungarian keeper Gelei, but eminently forgettable in every other sense. He grimaces at the memory of the humiliations that followed. Tostao lays the blame on the lack of organization and basic physical fitness.
‘From the group of 1958 and 1962, the only one who was in condition to play was Pelé. Djalma Santos, Gilmar, Bellini, Orlando, Garrincha, no,’ he says, shaking his head. Tostao had heard the stories about Garrincha’s alcoholism but still found his disconnection from reality hard to believe. ‘They said that Garrincha didn’t even know who the opponents were in the Final in 1958. In England Garrincha was in no condition at all and played.’

He left England regretting that Feola had failed to listen to those, himself included, who believed that rather than being his understudy, he should be Pelé’s partner. It had been in a warm-up match in Sweden on the way to England that Tostao had sensed he had found a kindred spirit. ‘It was a friendly game and we understood each other immediately,’ he says. ‘He needed a more intelligent player at his side, a player that understood where he was going to be.’

It is perhaps his greatest footballing regret that they didn’t play together more frequently. ‘Today the Brazilian squad meets every month. In my time it was not like that, we played two or three games a year. If I had had the opportunity to play in the same team as him, our partnership would have been richer.’ It was not only Tostao’s loss, it was the world’s too.

Tostao’s journey to Mexico was at times unbearably eventful. He was the unquestioned hero of Brazil’s qualification campaign under Saldanha. His all-round contribution was as profound as it would be in the finals. During the team’s travels around South America and back in the Maracana in August 1969, however, it was his phenomenal goalscoring ability that set his countrymen’s hearts racing.

He had forced his way into Saldanha’s side with his display against England in June that year. Ramsey’s men arrived from Mexico with an unbeaten tour record and a quiet confidence that they could strike an early psychological blow against the side already being trumpeted as their most serious rival the following summer. Brazil emerged with the mental edge, after a convincing 2–1 win in which Tostao scored a spectacular winner.

As the ball had broken loose in the English defence, Tostao seemed to pose no threat as he lay prostrate on the pitch. Seeing the ball moving towards him, however, he levered his lower body off the grass with his arms and executed a mid-air scissor-kick that sent the ball crashing home. Back on Fleet Street, photographs of Tostao levitating himself to manufacture a barely believable goalscoring shot was used as chilling evidence of Brazil’s rediscovered divinity.

Years later Tostao was shown copies of the back-page eulogies he received. ‘The people didn’t understand how I scored that goal,’ he says, a boyish smile breaking across his face. The goal proved a portent of things to come that summer.

From the moment he pounced on the Colombian keeper Lagarcha’s parry of a Pelé free kick in the thiry-ninth minute of the opening elimanatoria match in Bogotá, Tostao was in the most lethal form of his international career. He scored the second in the 2–0 win in Bogotá and four days later broke the deadlock against the Venezuelans in Caracas. Tostao left the defenders Chico and Freddy floundering before finishing with a cool shot, thirteen minutes from time. In the remaining quarter of an hour he and Pelé ran riot, first Tostao setting up his partner for the second then scoring the third and fourth goals himself.

His form continued back at the Maracana. He scored two more in the 6–2 win over Colombia but saved his finishing masterclass for the decisive win over Venezuela on 24 August. His hat trick within 24 minutes took his tally to ten in four matches and his team to Mexico. Pelé scored the only goal in the final match against Paraguay. By the end of the month the duo had scored fourteen goals in five games between them.

Tostao’s free-scoring performances won him the headlines normally reserved for Pelé. In Europe, where he had only flickered in 1966, the White Pelé became the symbol of the new, revitalized Brazil. Soon he would symbolize the fragility of his nation’s confidence instead.

Tostao’s career – and so his life – was transformed during a Corinthians v. Cruizeiro match in late September 1969. In a freak accident he was hit in the face by a ball from Corinthians full-back Ditao. Such was the force of the impact he could not see afterwards. In hospital he was diagnosed as having suffered a detached retina.

Drawing on his own connections, Tostao engaged one of Belo Horizonte’s most eminent medical figures, Dr Robert Abdalla Moura. On 3 October all Brazil held its breath as Tosta^·o and Dr Moura flew to Houston to undergo potentially risky surgery to the eye. Moura performed the operation himself at the Santa Monica Ophthalmology Center in Houston and returned to Brazil to pronounce himself pleased with the results.

The following months were agonizing for Tostao. In April 1970, on the Friday before he was due to make his comeback against Paraguay in the penultimate warm-up, Tosta^·o woke up in bed in Belo Horizonte with blood streaming from his left eye. At first his bad luck looked like Dario’s good fortune. Instead the game ended a goalless draw and both teams were jeered off the pitch. It proved the last time the President’s favourite wore the No. 9 shirt and reminded Zagalo how priceless Tostao was to his side.

At first Zagalo had to be convinced of Tostao’s importance to the campaign. ‘When Zagalo took over he was soon saying that I was a reserve to Pelé. Up front he said he needed a player of speed,’ Tostao explains. As the manager watched the team at work in practice in the warm-up matches and began to switch Saldanha’s 4–2–4 formation to a more flexible 4–3–3, however, Tostao’s importance to the side became clear.

Like Rivellino, Piazza and Jairzinho, Tostao was asked to adapt his natural game to fit into the plan. His sacrifice was, perhaps, the greatest of all. Zagalo asked Tostao to suppress his predatory instincts and act as a sophisticated target man instead. He would spend much of the Mexican campaign with his back to goal, flicking and stroking off a range of simple and subtle passes to Jairzinho and Rivellino, Pelé and Gérson. ‘They needed somebody to organize the game up front. I was the pawn,’ he smiles.

Yet when he joined the squad at Guanajuato, there were those – Pelé included – who doubted whether he was physically and mentally up to the challenge ahead. Their fears were understandable. Tostao cut a sensitive, secretive figure at the training pitches. Back in Brazil even President Médici had been expressing his public concern at his fitness. At the sight of a quote-hungry journalist he would hold up his hands and plead ‘Please don’t ask me about my eye’. Within the camp his insecurity became unsettling. Publicly Pelé expressed confidence that his friend would pull through. Privately he harboured serious doubts. What else was he to think when he saw Tostao unwilling to head a ball in training? ‘They were a little bit apprehensive, scared that I was not well,’ he nods, pouring some more coffee as he speaks.

Two weeks before the first match he suffered an attack of conjunctivitis. As Dr Abdalla spent a day examining him he offered to withdraw so Zagalo could draft in a replacement. ‘I said: “If you are not confident that I can play you should fire me and I would understand”.’

Tostao’s friendship with Piazza allowed him his peace and quiet in their room. While Piazza made himself scarce, Tostao would spend hours dismantling and studying a large, plastic medical school model of an eye he had been given by Dr Abdalla. The model helped him overcome his fear. ‘We are only frightened when we don’t know what we are suffering from. I know my problem very well,’ he told reporters philosophically at the time. Dr Abdalla remained in Guadalajara and, with Tostao’s parents, was a frequent visitor to the Suites Caribes.

As his strength and confidence returned, his patience with the press had seemed to mirror his renewed determination. ‘If I give up now, I will never play football again and I will never feel self-confident any more. I cannot give up. Am I a man or a mouse?’ he had said, a new defiance in his voice.

Tostao had been the team’s touchstone the previous August. Not a man for idle boasting, when he began to talk of Brazil winning his confidence spread through the camp. Even today he can recall the calm certainty he felt in the final days before the opening match. ‘It is not something I can explain, it is something deep inside. I am a very intuitive man. I always have a feeling when something good or bad is going to happen and rarely am I wrong.’

Despite the traumas of the preceding months, Tostao fulfilled all his potential in Mexico. He was perhaps the most consistent of all the team. Yet when he puts his own performances in the World Cup under the microscope, his hypercritical mind finds them wanting. As far as he is concerned he made three ‘great moves’ in the tournament. ‘If I left those three moves out I would say I played badly – sincerely.’

He scored two goals against Peru – the first an impudent shot inside Rubinos’ near post, the second a scooped shot high into the netting from a dangerous cross-cum-shot by Pelé. Yet he discounts them both. ‘The two goals I scored were two simple goals, nothing exceptional,’ he says. ‘The rest of my contribution was important tactically, very important without doubt, as a pawn.’

Watch Tostao score against Peru in Mexico 1970

He admits the first, the ‘nutmeg’ of Bobby Moore which led to Jairzinho’s goal against England, owed as much to panic as premeditation. He had seen Zagalo warming up his replacement Roberto on the touchline and realized he would have to pull out something special just to remain on the pitch.

‘Without doubt it was the most difficult match because England annulled Brazil’s moves. Tactically England were perfect, it became a chess match,’ he says. ‘Roberto was warming up. I thought “He’ll replace me so I must do something now”.’

He had already had a shot deflected when he picked up the ball again on the left. His twisting, turning run took him through Moore’s legs and away again. His back was turned to the goal, yet his swivelled cross travelled deep into the crowded English area and straight to the feet of Pelé. Pelé sucked in the defence before unloading the decisive pass to Jairzinho. Even the telepathic twosome had never managed quite such a psychic connection. In the elation that followed Jairzinho’s goal, however, Tostao was still substituted. ‘They had signed the papers, before the goal,’ he smiles. ‘But there is no doubt the substitution was a stimulus for me to try something different.’

He is far prouder of his crucial contributions in setting up Clodoaldo and Jairzinho’s goals in the semi-final against Uruguay. Amid the fireworks of Pelé and Rivellino, Gérson and Jairzinho, the moments are hardly ones that blaze away in the memory. Both were perfectly weighted, inch-accurate through balls rather than moments of extemporized goalscoring. That he should choose these two moments above all others is perhaps the ultimate testimony to his philosophy as a footballer. For Tostao both were triumphs of substance over style.

‘Clodoaldo ran and shouted to receive the ball in front of him. I was able to wait a few seconds so he could arrive in the right position,’ he says of the first. For the second he had to place a ball in a tiny two-metre space between the advancing Jairzinho and a retreating defender. ‘I was very conscious that if I gave the pass in front of the defender he would arrive first. So I gave the pass in front of Jair and behind the defender. When Jair controlled it the defender tried to turn, lost control and Jair went on and scored,’ he says.
‘I’m more proud about them than the move against England because there it was completely emotional. In the two against Uruguay I had the clear sensation of the consciousness of the move.’

Given the dramas that had befallen him en route to Mexico City, the sensitive Tostao found the Final almost too much to bear. He had been a restless sleeper throughout his career. ‘When journalists asked me how I was before an important game, I would say “I’m very well, confident”,’ he smiles. ‘The truth was I was extremely tense, I didn’t sleep well because I was preoccupied, thinking.’ He admits he barely slept during the stormy night of 20 June.

Tostao’s respect for Gérson was enormous. ‘Carlos Alberto was the captain, the great leader was Gérson,’ says Tostao. Of all the side, he was the player in whom he felt he could confide. ‘I liked him very much. We would sit up until three or four o’clock in the morning talking,’ he says. The two men sat up late on the night before the Final, each calming the other’s nerves.

The Final represented Tostao’s ultimate sacrifice. He had been involved in the discussions about how to turn Italy’s man-marking system to Brazil’s advantage. ‘It was the most clear example of the group working together,’ he says. As well as the ruse to draw Facchetti out of position, Zagalo and his team sensed that Tostao’s ability off the ball might be able to create precious space for his midfield colleagues too.

‘We agreed that I would play far in front. I would not go back to receive the ball, I should stay with the spare defender, obliging him to stay with me.’ The plan worked perfectly during the opening phase of the match as Rosato played the unwitting consigliere to his Godfather, shadowing his master’s every move. As Tosta^·o buzzed around amongst the back three, Rivellino and Gérson duly discovered the Azteca opening up to them. ‘If Rivellino had been on top of his game he would have scored at least two goals from outside the area. I think he put five shots over the bar,’ Tostao says with a rueful smile.

The Platonic principles at work within the side had borne remarkable fruit on the way to the Azteca. But perhaps nothing summed up the collective spirit better than Tostao’s supremely selfless contribution to the Final. His intelligent runs off the ball kept Rosato and the Italian defence guessing all afternoon. ‘My pleasure was to play with the ball but against Italy I was playing without the ball,’ he says.

Tostao even appeared in the penalty area to clear the lines at one moment of danger in the second half. We also tend to forget that the famous Carlos Alberto move was begun when Tostao, running himself into the ground in the dying minutes, dispossessed an Italian deep in his own half.

All of us who witnessed it remember the Final for the beauty of that closing phase of play. Gérson and Jairzinho’s goals paved the way for a flourish that embodied all the qualities that had made the Brazilians the most admired and loved side in the history of the tournament. Tosta^·o’s memories too are dominated by the sheer emotion of its climax. After Jairzinho scored the third goal and he knew the game was safe he admits he could contain his feelings no longer. As the sun poked through, the pitch had begun to dry. Tosta^·o’s tears were soon dampening the lush Azteca once more. ‘I played the last fifteen minutes crying,’ he confesses, wiping the moisture from his eyes as he speaks.

When the final whistle went Tostao became, with Pelé, the focus of the crowd’s adulation. The two had turned to each other and embraced. As others ran for cover they were swamped by the throng. Tostao’s initial joy soon gave way to fear as Brazilian and Mexican fans ripped his boots, shirt, shorts and socks off him. ‘I was in the middle of the pitch. At first it was huge emotion but then I realized I only had my underwear on,’ he says. ‘I was in panic, the Mexican police rescued me.’ He was delivered to a dressing room convulsed by a crise de choro, ‘a crisis of tears’. It was only hours later that he began to absorb the full impact of what had happened.

With Pelé and the rest he had gone out to the official party at the Hotel Isabel Maria on the Reforma in the centre of Mexico City. Once more the players found themselves besieged by elated Brazilian and Mexican fans and had to virtually fight their way into the party. The popular Brazilian singer Wilson Simonal had been hired to sing. Carlos Alberto led the dancing as the party went on until 1 a.m. on the Monday morning. Pelé, Carlos Alberto and Zagalo were among those who were summoned at one point to talk to President Médici on the telephone. All three struggled to hear a word he was saying.

Tostao stayed only briefly, however. He slipped out without a word and headed back to his room at the hotel. ‘I am a reclusive person. I wanted to be alone in my room,’ he says simply.

Tostao gave his medal and his No. 9 shirt to Dr Abdalla as a mark of thanks. As he returned to Brazil a national hero, his beloved solitude – and peace of mind – were commodities he would find increasingly hard to come by.

Gato Felix

Name: Felix Milalli Venerando

Born: December 24, 1937, Mooca, Sao Paulo

First Professional Club: Portuguesa

 

Felix was born on Christmas Eve 1937, in the Italian-dominated Mooca area of Sao Paulo, the second of five children. His father worked as an engineer in a nylon stocking factory called Mussolini but it was his mother who dictated affairs at home.

A stern, strict woman, she – like most of the team’s mothers as it turns out – disapproved of Félix playing football. ‘She was against it,’ he says, shooting a plume of smoke skyward as we sit and talk in an office high above the workshop floor. ‘My mother never wanted me to play football.’ For Félix, however, there was no passion to compete with it. ‘I think it is in the Brazilian blood, every boy sleeps with a football under his pillow.’ It was while his son – and his wife – slept that Félix’s father surreptitiously helped his son fulfil his dreams. He would leave home for work at 5.30 a.m. with his son’s chuteira, football boots, hidden in his work bag. Félix would collect the boots from the Mussolini factory which was on his way to school. ‘It was our secret,’ he says with a conspiratorial smile.

Like every Brazilian boy he wanted to emulate Friedenreich and Leônidas, the great goalscoring heroes of the 1930s and 40s. ‘I was a centre-forward,’ he says. His courageousness – or perhaps emerging craziness – in throwing himself around on the streets soon marked him out as a promising goalkeeper, however.

 

Any disappointment he might have had at discovering his best position was at the non-glory end was relatively short-lived. ‘Here in Brazil if a player is no good playing in front, he’ll be a goalkeeper. But not in my case. I started playing in goal because generally nobody wanted to play there and I was very courageous. We played on the streets and I would dive on the pavements,’ he says, with an unsettling wink. ‘I started to like it.’

His deception of his mother continued even after he found a place in a junior side at the Clube Atletico Juventus, at their ground on the Rua Javari. Félix had found a post as an office boy in the dispatch department of a large company, Maquinas Piratininga, and had convinced his mother he was on the road to a career in accountancy. As it turned out, double-entry book-keeping was his route to a career in professional goalkeeping.

By now Santos had expressed their interest in having him join as a juvenil goalkeeper and he had begun to leave work early to travel to their ground an hour or so away. The great Gilmar, like Félix a product of Juventus, was already at the famous Vila Belmiro stadium on the coast. The director whose permission Félix would seek to leave work early also happened to be a director of Portuguesa. ‘He asked me: “Why am I setting you free to train for Santos? If you are good go to Portuguesa”.’ Félix showed the Portuguesa goalkeeping coach Valdinho de Morais what he could do. While Santos were away in Argentina, Sao Paulo’s then leading club snapped him up instead.

 

Félix’s role models were keepers like the star of Sao Paulo football, Oberlan Tacame of Palmeiras. ‘He was a phenomenon, a legend,’ he says. At Portuguesa he was groomed by Morais, who was one of the best goalkeeping coaches of his time. With his spindly legs and slight build, Félix hardly filled the goalmouth with a domineering presence. His nickname at Portuguesa was papel, paper.‘Because I was so thin.’

Yet he refused his coach’s advice to take up weight-training to bulk himself up. ‘I would have become a robot,’ he says. ‘I was always against body-building, except maybe a little bit for the legs, for the power to propel.’

His rail-thin frame wrapped in the red and green hoops of Portuguesa, Félix cut one of the more colourful figures in Sa^·o Paulo football. What he lacked in physical presence he more than made up for in bravery. At times his courage bordered on the reckless and he suffered a succession of injuries. He was also the most voluble goalkeeper in Brazil, often walking off the pitch hoarse from his efforts to be heard above the huge crowds at Sao Paulo’s great stadia, Pacaembu and Morumbi.

One way and another, Félix could not fail to catch the eye and by 1965 Aimore Moreira had drafted him into his vast squad for England. Félix played in a Brazilian XI against Hungary at Pacaembu. After a faultless display in what would prove a false dawn, 5–0 win he was hopeful of a place in Moreira’s final 22 for England.

 

When he relegated Félix to the azulona squad, ‘the unlucky ones’, Moreira may actually have been doing his career a favour. Both Gilmar and the second-string keeper, Manga, returned to Brazil in disgrace. Gilmar soon announced his retirement, Manga left for Nacional in Uruguay and Félix quickly emerged as the new No. 1 in a new-look Brazilian squad.

Félix was Saldanha’s first choice in all the eliminators and he had, by common consent, done well enough, keeping clean sheets against Paraguay, Venezuela and Colombia in the away matches. But when the quixotic coach returned from Europe, obsessed with the idea that his team was about to suffer something akin to the Luftwaffe’s assault on 1940s London, he dropped Félix for the bulkier, younger Leao of Palmeiras.

Félix fumbles for a new cigarette before he can bring himself to speak of Saldanha. ‘Saldanha alleged that I was thin, that I had no strong body, that I could not bear the shock of those big guys,’ he says, flicking fiercely at his lighter. ‘I was always courageous, I would dive at people’s feet. I had broken fingers, a broken jaw, I had fractured three or four ribs. If I was scared of crashing into these guys I would not have been in goal.’ Félix extends his right hand. One of his fingers is crooked grotesquely, a permanent reminder of his willingness to take the heaviest hits.

To be fair, some of the coach’s excuses did verge on the ludicrous. ‘Saldanha said it was the rainy season in Mexico and I would not know how to play with gloves,’ he says, arching an eyebrow. Félix made a point of playing in the Final with gloves.

When Saldanha finally tilted at one windmill too many, no one, not even Pelé, was happier to see Zagalo taking up the reins. ‘It was excellent for me,’ chuckles Félix. Zagalo reversed Saldanha’s decision, restoring Félix and dropping Leao from the squad. The younger keeper never forgave his replacement. On his final day with the squad, Leao threw a prima donna-ish tantrum effectively accusing Félix of being Zagalo’s puppet. ‘He left crying,’ says Félix, seeming to suggest that Leao may be from the less barmy branch of the goalkeeping union.

Félix still recalls the moment when Leao was later called back to the squad and to camp Guanajuato. ‘Zagalo asked my opinion and I said: “Call that boy”. The place was a castle, the door creaked and Leao came in. I said: “Congratulations”. He said: “Justice has been done!”.’ Félix shrugs. ‘I’m not the kind of person to keep rancour; I think he is.’
In the run up to the first match, a poll of Brazilian football fans gave Félix a resounding vote of confidence by naming him their number one No. 1. He put the fact that 92 per cent thought all three of the squad’s options inferior to Gilmar to the back of his mind.

At the age of thirty-three, Félix was comfortably the senior member of the squad in Mexico. ‘I was the ancient one,’ he says with evident pride. He roomed with the youngest player, the teenage Marco Antonio, his team-mate at Fluminense, where he had moved by now. With the squad’s other senior professionals, Gérson, Piazza, Brito and Carlos Alberto, Félix served on a five-man players’ committee that would represent the squad’s cause in meetings with Havelange, Zagalo and the men of the CBD. The quintet kept the younger players in line. Their message was clear: ‘You may have another chance but we may not.’ ‘We were a little bit older, we knew we would not play in the next World Cup,’ he says. ‘We said to each other. “Let’s see if we can finish our career in a good way”.’

If he was a father figure, he was also – with Brito – one of the squad’s two jesters-in-chief. Félix’s off-beam humour was no respecter of reputations. Everyone had to have a nickname. Brito was cavalo, the horse, Rivellino orelha, big ears. Piazza was PePe, Clodoaldo, corro, his nickname at Santos. Jairzinho, J. J. or furacao. Carlos Alberto was simply capita^·o. Pelé was far happier being called criola or negrao, neither of which needs translation, than he was being called, as Brito sometimes did, o rei, the king. ‘He was a simple man and he didn’t like that,’ says Félix.

Tostao arrived at Guanajuato, sensitive, nervous and insular, after a major eye operation. His parents had even followed him to Mexico, worried at his state of mind. Félix’s idea of a welcome was to provide him with his freshly minted, Mexican monicker. He took one look at Tostao, still badly marked from his surgery, and knew instantly what to say. ‘Cheer up egg-face,’ he laughs. He shoots me another one of his looks. ‘I thought it might brighten his mood a little.’

The intellectual Tostao may have found it hard to appreciate, but there was method in Félix’s peculiar brand of madness. The more positive and optimistic the atmosphere inside their fortress, the less the squad would worry about the ugly mood of pessimism swilling around back in Rio, Sa^·o Paulo and the rest of Brazil.

Brazil claims much that is unique in its football. The extraordinary fickleness of its fans and its press in particular is one of its unsung traits, however. The vast majority of the Brazilian media was convinced its squad was too weak in defence to mount a serious assault on the Europeans – England, Italy, Germany and Czechoslovakia in particular. ‘It is easier to find a giraffe than an optimist,’ mused the poet and football fanatic Nelson Rodriguez at the time. No one took more flak than Félix. ‘I was the most criticized player in the team,’ he says defiantly. ‘It was unfair but I’m the kind of guy who can swallow it.’

Gerson de Oliveira Nunes

Name: Gerson de Oliveira Nunes

Born: January 11, 1941, Rio

First Professional Club: Flamengo

 

Watch Gerson In Action

Papagaio

Gerson with the Brazil squad in 1970, second from left front row.

At junior school in the southern Brazilian city of Niteroi, the young Gérson de Oliveira Nunes was known as papagaio, the parrot. A lean, rugged, square-shouldered boy, he was never short of an opinion, particularly on the football pitch where he already cut a confident and commanding figure. The fact that his words could never match the eloquence of the sublime left foot he possessed did little to quieten him. The reputation for rampant verbosity remained with him throughout sixteen years as a professional with Flamengo, Botafogo, Sao Paulo and finally Fluminense. So too did the nickname.

He was born on 11 January 1941, to a family with football in its veins. His father Clovis Nunes and his uncle were both professionals in Rio. The legendary Zizinho, with Ademir and Jair part of the free-scoring Brazilian forward line of 1950, was a close friend of his father’s and a familiar face at the Nunes household. When the teenage Gérson announced his intention of becoming a footballer too, he found few obstacles put in his way. ‘I did not have lots of problems in that respect,’ he smiles.

As a boy his heroes had been Zizinho and Danilo and Jair. At his first club, Flamengo, across Guanabara Bay in Rio, however, he found himself cast in the same mould as the most influential midfield player of Brazil’s first gilded age, Didi. The young Gérson combined speed and ferocious shooting power with the intelligence and ability to control a game from the midfield, the meio de campo. One of his greatest assets was his ability to switch defence into attack with one long, laser-like pass – or lançamento – from deep in his own half. Soon he was being talked of as a successor to Didi.

Even in adolescence, Gérson resisted the comparison. He was his own man, the original Gérson not the next Didi, although he admits he had an affinity with him. ‘His style of play was very similar to mine,’ he nods. The suggestion that he modelled himself on him meets with a pursing of the lips and a stern, shrugged ‘No’.

Gérson’s first five years in the game represented an almost seamless rise through the ranks. Within a year of making his professional debut for Flamengo in 1958, he was in the Brazilian ‘amateur’ team in the Pan-American Games. A year later he was a lynchpin of the side at the Rome Olympics. By 1961, with Didi in decline, he was the playmaker at Flamengo and had starred in the Brazilian side that won the inter-South American competition, the Oswaldo Cruz Cup. He had also been recruited into the full national squad to defend the World Cup in Chile by the new national coach Aimore Moreira.

By now Gérson had made the short journey from Flamengo to Botafogo, also in Rio, home to the most natural talent of all, his boyhood idol Garrincha. His dreams of combining with the bandy-legged ‘Little Bird’, along with Pelé and Didi, in Chile were dashed when he suffered a serious knee injury. Forced to undergo surgery, he couldn’t get himself back into Moreira’s squad. It would be one of many injuries to blight his career.

Gérson arrived at Mexico with much work to do. He was twenty-nine, approaching the end of a career that had somehow failed to fulfil its early, infinite promise. Even more than for Pelé, 1970 had represented his last realistic chance to stamp his greatness on the world game.

Brito

Hercules de Brito Ruas was born on 9 August 1939 in Rio where he seems to have settled in the same poor Vila de Penha suburb as Carlos Alberto.

Brito, then at Vasco da Gama, had travelled to England in 1966 but had spent his trip on the bench, understudying Feola’s ageing back four. Four years later Zagalo had built his defence around his muscular, 6ft 2in, 80 kg frame, by now the rock of the defence at Flamengo.

Brito’s long, powerful physique and unnatural strength made him the butt of many of the Guanajuato jokes. ‘We used to say that man was not descended from monkeys. First Brito was born, then the monkeys and then man,’ Piazza had said.

His humour seems to have been only a little more sophisticated. ‘If you were taking a photograph he would come and insist on taking it for you,’ Piazza told me. ‘It would be developed and then it would be only the legs, from the waist downwards. It was his idea of a joke.’ Clodoaldo had told me how Brito hid false teeth in Mario Americo’s food. ‘He was going to eat and suddenly he was shouting “Oh, my God”.’

Yet for all his reputation for Carioca craziness, Brito had taken his last chance of World Cup glory as seriously as any member of the squad. At the age of thirty, he was clearly in the best physical condition of his life. ‘In the Cooper Tests, he came out as the fittest physically of all of us,’ Rivellino had told me. His preparation paid dividends in a campaign in which he was stretched to the limit.

Brito lacked the calculating calmness of a Bobby Moore or the all-round footballing ability of a Franz Beckenbauer. He was responsible for his share of errors. Blame for Petras’ opening goal for the Czechs, Sotil’s second in the quarter-final against Peru, and, if we are being harsh, Boninsegna’s in the Final, could comfortably be laid at his door.

Yet talking to his colleagues it was clear that his importance to the side was considerable. Brito’s was the most vocal and physical presence in the Brazilian defence. ‘He would call me chefinho, little boss. He would shout “Come on chefinho”,’ Piazza had told me. Even Gérson had called him ‘a lion’ among men.

Perhaps his finest performance came against England. For all the heavy artillery wheeled out against him, Brito held resolute. In the Final too, his strength of personality helped overcome the frequent lapses. No contribution was more important than a wonderful tackle on Boninsegna when Piazza had let him through on goal in the final fifteen minutes. Brito’s intervention effectively snuffed out Italy’s resistance. Soon Clodoaldo was constructing the coup de grace that would end the game in such glorious style.

Brito’s career seems to have taken a slide afterwards, in part because of his age, in part because of his loosening grip on his temper. Zagalo had been at the Maracana during the final match of the 1971 Carioca Championship between his Fluminense and Brito’s Botafogo. Botafogo had only needed a draw to win the title. They were within a minute of holding out for a 0–0 draw when Lula scored a controversial last-minute goal. In front of 142,000 fans Brito protested to the referee that Marco Antonio had pushed his keeper Urbirajara and that he had been offside. When he refused to cancel the goal, Brito laid him out with a haymaking punch.

When Zagalo recalled virtually the entire squad for the Independence Cup tournament in 1972, Brito was the most glaring omission. He retired from the game soon afterwards. Today he oversees the provision of sports facilities for local schoolchildren in Rio.

Jairzinho – The Hurricane

Name: Jair Venture Filha

Born: December 25, 1944, Duque de Caxias, Rio de Janeiro

First Professional Club: Botafogo

Jairzinho – The Hurricane

Compilation: The Best of Jairzinho

Jair Ventura Filha was born in the northern Rio suburb of Duque de Caxias on Christmas Day in 1944. His prodigious speed and strength on the ball was quickly spotted by the coaches at Botafogo where he signed as an amateur in 1961 at the age of sixteen. He turned professional shortly after winning a gold medal for Brazil in the 1963 Pan-American Games. It was at Botafogo that he had been first called Jairzinho, ‘little Jair’. The name distinguished him from the then more famous international Jair da Rosa Pinto of Portuguesa. It was on the terraces of the Maracana· that he won his distinctive nickname furacao, the hurricane.

With Gerson, Tostao,and Brito, Jairzinho had been one of the new generation to witness the humiliation of Goodison Park at first hand. He played in all three matches in England in 1966 but offered little or no evidence of the greatness that was to come.

By 1970, however, his star was in the ascendant. He had scored freely in the eliminators and had developed a good understanding with Gérson and Pelé in particular. Only Rogério offered a serious threat to his position on the right wing. By the final warm-up in Rio against Austria, his rival’s indifferent form and injury problems had effectively ended his challenge.

Jairzinho arrived in Mexico determined to make amends for 1966. He was one of the players to benefit most from the Cooper Tests and Captain Coutinho’s disciplinarian training regime. Photographs of a shirtless Jairzinho at the training camps reveal a heavily muscled upper body and a powerfully built all-round athlete. In the sprinting tests he was comfortably the quickest of the 22-man squad over 50 metres.

From the opening match against the Czechs, the quiet man of the squad did his talking on the pitch. Jairzinho scored twice, first collecting a Gérson probe, flicking the ball over Viktor’s head before volleying extravagantly home, then crowning an irresistible, barnstorming run down the right with a perfectly placed shot inside the right-hand post. From then on he could not lose the goalscoring habit.

He scored again against England and Rumania in the group matches and Peru in the quarter-final. In Gérson’s absence, Rivellino and Paulo Cézar had taken over the role of provider. Both provided passes that gave him the half-a-yard headstart he required to skin defences alive. Only Bobby Moore, with the most perfectly timed tackle of the tournament, worked out a way of curbing him.

Yet there was much more to Jairzinho’s game than mere bullish power and pace. No one suffered more from the Uruguayan tackling in the semi-final. It was a measure of the restraint Zagalo had instilled in him that he failed to react once. Instead he replied in the best manner possible, latching on to an impeccable through ball from Tostao to outrun Mujica and score what would prove the decisive goal in the match.

His contribution to the Final illustrated his abilities without the ball too. Against Italy Jairzinho’s most effective work was done in drawing his man-marker Facchetti out of position in the middle of the pitch. Carlos Alberto wreaked carnage in his wake.

The reward for his selflessness came in the seventieth minute. As he forced Pelé’s knock-down over the line, Jairzinho’s place in history was assured. No player before or since has matched the flying furacao’s record of scoring in every match of a World Cup finals stage. In the cat-and-mouse climate of modern World Cups, it is hard to see how anyone ever will.

The Road To Mexico – Brazil’s 1969 Qualification Campaign

Brazil’s qualification campaign was a miniature version of the World Cup itself, a series of six games, played home and away against three of its leading South American rivals, Paraguay, Venezuela and Colombia.

It began on 6 August 1969, with a comfortable 2–0 win over Colombia in Bogotá. Saldanha’s gamble of playing Tostao and Pelé together paid off as the Cruzeiro man scored both goals, the first pouncing when Colombian keeper Lagarcha could only parry a 30-yard Pelé free kick. Four days later, against Venezuela, in Caracas, Tostao was the hero once more, breaking seventy-seven minutes of deadlock with a brilliant solo dribble and shot. In the final quarter of the game Pelé scored twice and Tosta^·o completed a hat trick in an unlikely 5–0 thrashing.

By the time they took the pitch in Asuncion seven days later, the match against Paraguay, who had also twice won away from home, had the look of a qualification decider. After a goalless and virtually chanceless first half, the breakthrough owed as much to luck as inspiration. Left-back Valentin Mendoza, harassed by Jairzinho, slashed at the ball in an attempt to clear his lines. The Paraguayan keeper Aguillera could only look on helplessly as the sliced kick ballooned over him into the goal. The fluke broke the Paraguayan resistance and three minutes later Jairzinho scored himself. Edu added a

third on the final whistle to flatter Brazil with a 0–3 scoreline. The goals took Brazil’s tally to ten in three matches, but more importantly saw off their only real challengers.

Four days later on 21 August they were back at the Maracana^· facing Colombia in the first of three matches to be squeezed into ten days. When Pelé set Tosta^·o up for the first it looked plain sailing but Colombia equalized when Mesa dispossessed a sleepy Gérson and beat Félix, the small Fluminense goalkeeper Saldanha had selected in all the qualifiers to date. The visitors almost took the lead moments later when Félix was caught off-guard by a speculative long shot. By the second half the Colombian keeper Lagarcha had left the pitch with a damaged hand and been replaced by Quintana. Rather than weakening their defence, the reserve went on to turn in one of the best performances of the year at the Maracana.

There was little he could do when Segovia mistimed a tackle on Tostao leaving him with another, short-range shot to score. He was equally powerless when an Edu free kick hit a defender’s leg and deflected into his goal for the third. After Colombia clawed their way back into the match with an astonishing 40-yard shot from Gallego, however, he pulled off a string of magnificent saves. For a while Colombia threatened to draw level. Pelé extended Brazil’s lead but was then replaced by Paulo Cézar of Flamengo. At the same time Saldanha substituted Gérson with Rivellino, the rising star of Corinthians in Sao Paulo. The modifications did the trick as Rivellino scored four minutes from time. Jairzinho rubbed salt in with a sixth at the death. If it had not been for Quintana and the post, Brazil could have hit double figures. The Colombian was given a standing ovation by the Maracana as he left the pitch.

The hard-fought win put Brazil within one game of qualification. Within three days they had booked their place in Mexico. In front of a crowd of 123,000, Tostao got off to a flier in the return against Venezuela, scoring in the seventh, twenty-first and twenty-fourth minutes for one of the fastest hat tricks ever seen in international football. Pelé’s passing had contributed to each of the goals and he was again the provider in the thirtieth minute when Jairzinho scored. In injury time in the first half, he added his own name to the score sheet with a penalty. With a 5–0 lead going into the second half, Brazil understandably relaxed. Venezuela even managed to hit the post as they were given a free rein. Pelé rounded off the win with the best goal of the game, a weave of inter-passing with Tostao and Jairzinho which ended with a stunning shot past Fazano.

By the time the stubborn Paraguayans came to Rio on 31 August there was no spoiling the party. A vast 183,000 crowd packed the Maracana. Paraguay once more mounted admirable resistance. But it was Pelé who had the final say in the group, pouncing when Aguillera failed to hold on to a ferocious shot from Edu.

 

Within Brazil there was a sense that the good times were ready to roll once more. Saldanha had suffused style with organization and in Pelé and Tostao unearthed a goalscoring partnership that promised to outshine anything even Brazil had seen before.

Clodoaldo – The Altar Boy

Name: Clodoaldo Tavares Santana

Born: September 25, 1949, Aracaju

First Professional Club: Santos

<h3″>The Altar Boy

‘If in your childhood or adolescence you didn’t have a very good life, I think it makes you fight for your goals with more determination than a person who has been born in a golden cradle.’

If they were being delivered upstairs in the corporate conference suites of Sao Paulo’s Hotel Melia, Clodoaldo Tavares Santana’s words might sound like another slice of self-help psychobabble, a glib one-liner from the latest motivational management manual. Whispered like a liturgy downstairs in the lobby of one of the city’s most opulent buildings, however, they carry a simplicity and sincerity it is impossible to find uninspiring.

On the surface, at least, Clodoaldo exudes the same look of well-pressed well-being as the American and Japanese businessmen milling around the hotel’s entrance. Dressed in an immaculate Italian shirt and slacks, a chunky Rolex on his wrist, he seems as natural a part of his surroundings as the polished marble and the crystal chandeliers. Beside him sits his mobile phone and his personal organizer. The cards in his wallet are probably platinum.

Yet in truth Clodoaldo’s roots could not lie further from this golden cradle of modern Brazil. The extraordinary story of his childhood and adolescence explains why he regards every day as a fight for his life.

Appearances have always been deceptive where Clodoaldo is concerned. Back in 1970, for instance, he looked like an altar boy and played like an assassin. The twenty-year-old was the team’s energetic enforcer, its midfield fetcher and carrier, willing to run himself into the Mexican ground for the Brazilian cause. It was only in the dying minutes of the Final, as he began the unforgettable move that set up Carlos Alberto’s goal, that we glimpsed the angelic skills he had subdued for the greater good of what he still calls ‘the motherland’. Clodoaldo’s mazy dribble past four Italian defenders was an unscripted blend of football, samba and sheer humiliation. It was as if Nobby Stiles had suddenly turned himself into George Best.

Clodoaldo was born on 25 September 1949 in the town of Aracaju in the state of Sergipano in the north-east of Brazil, the youngest of ten children, four brothers and six sisters.

The north-east, or Nordeste is the poorest, most chaotic part of the country and that with the closest links to its African past. It was here that the vast bulk of the slaves were put to work in the darkest days of the colonialist nineteenth century. To many it is the soul of the country. ‘The core of our nationality, the bedrock of our race,’ the writer Euclides da Cunha called it. With his limpid, childlike eyes and utterly unaffected air, Clodoaldo has the sort of simple serenity that his big city countrymen make fun of but which comes as close as you can get to the essence of Brazil – if this vast, infinitely varied nation can be said to have such a thing at all.

There is much that is remarkable about Clodoaldo. That this tranquillity survived the tragic events of his early life is perhaps the most remarkable quality of all. Clodoaldo was just six years old when his life was altered for ever. ‘My parents were killed in a car accident,’ he explains, matter-of-factly. Understandably, Clodoaldo does not like to dwell on the details. It seems his father was a transport worker. Apparently the accident happened on a dangerous stretch of road outside Aracaju.

What is clear is that the loss so devastated the family that Clodoaldo and some of his brothers and sisters could no longer bear to live in Aracaju. With what little money they had, they made the long journey south, ending up in the town of Praia Grande on the southern seaboard, near Sa^·o Paulo. From there they moved on to the bustling port of Santos.
For his brothers and sisters, life in the south was no less forgiving than that they had left behind. Eventually they returned to the Nordeste. For Clodoaldo, however, there was no turning back. ‘I decided to stay and confront life alone,’ he says.

His fate was, of course, far from unique. Thousands of orphaned young boys lived a similar existence in the favelas of Rio and Sa^·o Paulo. There they learned to live by their wits, or perish. According to the colourful, conventional wisdom, the roots of the Brazilian footballing phenomenon lies on the streets of these shanty towns. It is here that boys learned to play football with rolled up socks and oranges. It is here they schooled themselves in the methods of the Malandro, a folklore figure popularized in the songs of the 1920s and 1930s. The Malandro was a workshy, bohemian rascal, a ducker and diver able to use his guile to move in all circles of life without being pinned down to responsibility by anyone. Football was an extension of the Malandro’s arts, a game to be played with spontaneity and the wisdom of the street. It was the philosophy of Garrincha. It may never have been better personified than in the streetsmart genius of Romario.

Clodoaldo lived on a morro, or hillside slum, on the edge of a small Chinatown in one of the poorest parts of Santos. Whatever means he used to survive, however, he was no Malandro in the traditional sense. To begin with, he was willing to work for a living and did so from the age of nine. With the consent of the local courts, to whom he was answerable as a minor, he was hired at one of Santos’ vast coffee warehouses.

He was too slight for the back-breaking routine of loading and unloading the coffee sacks at the docks. ‘I could not bear the weight,’ he says. Instead he spent long hours sweeping the floors and keeping the stores in order. What little time he had left was spent sleeping or playing pelada on the streets.

What he lacked in physicality he more than made up for in fighting spirit. By 1965 he had graduated to a small local club, Barreiro, from where he later moved on to the junior side of Santos. As his talent blossomed at the club’s famous Vila Belmiro ground, Santos’ coaches encouraged Clodoaldo to skip work to concentrate on his training. When his bosses at the coffee warehouse detected his waning interest they sacked him.

As an amateur Clodoaldo earned nothing from his football. ‘Not enough for a sandwich,’ he says, shaking his head. Once more forced to live off his wits, he turned first to the Catholic Church for salvation. The Church had offered some semblance of sense when his world had been turned upside down. He had, from the age of six to ten or so, spent part of most days performing his duties as an altar boy. With his future uncertain, he persuaded the priests at a Santos seminary to take him in. A quiet, contemplative boy, Clodoaldo briefly considered a life of the cloth. To their eternal credit, however, his temporary landlords encouraged him to follow another path. ‘They saw I had another vocation,’ he says with a gentle smile.

When Clodoaldo explained his predicament to his coaches at Santos, they came up with an alternative solution. For the next two years of his life, the Vila Belmiro stadium became Clodoaldo’s orphange instead.

As Catholicism’s most serious rival as a religion, it was perhaps fitting that football was second only to the Church in providing futures for the poor boys of Brazil. As Clodoaldo discovered, even for those boys who did not go on to become titulars or first team players, the benefits of being taken on the books of a major club like Santos were immense.

Boys could be taken on as young as ten or eleven, when they would become members of the mirim squad. Between the ages of twelve and fourteen they would graduate to the infantil team, then the juvenil between the ages of fifteen and seventeen. The clubs treated their investments like young princes. As well as providing players with a monthly allowance, boys could expect to have all their medical, dental and nutritional needs looked after. When Pelé joined Santos, for instance, he had been put on an intense high-protein diet and a calisthenics programme to build up his slight-framed body. The clubs also contributed to improving their boys’ education by putting them in the better big city schools. If their careers as footballers did not work out, they had higher education or white-collar work to fall back on.

For many boys from the rural areas of Brazil the intensity of the training and the big city left them feeling homesick. Pelé tried to run away from Santos after five days there. For Clodoaldo, however, life inside the Vila Belmiro offered security he had never dreamed of before. ‘I had lost my job and had no means to support myself. I had no salary but at least there at Vila Belmiro I had somewhere to sleep and somewhere to eat.’ For the next two years of his life, the Santos ground became his life. It has remained central to his very existence ever since.

As a boy in his favela, Clodoaldo was given the nickname Corro (pronounced Co-ho). ‘I was very small and there is a bird, in the North, called corro.’ By his seventeenth birthday, Corro was ready to fly.

In the mid-1960s, the step into the dressing room of the Santos first team was an intimidating one for any player. The all-whites of the Vila Belmiro were by now the most famous – not to mention the hardest working – team in not just Brazil and South America but the world. Their first team included three double World Cup winners – Gilmar, Zito and Pelé, two more 1966 squad members – Orlando and Edu, and two more new Brazilian national stars – Joel and Carlos Alberto.

Since winning the World Club Championship in 1961 and 1962, the all-star eleven had superseded Real Madrid as the glamour club of the international scene. The lucrative, whirlwind tours of the world that had come with the status had already earned them uncharitable comparisons with basketball’s Harlem Globetrotters.

A ‘lightning tour’ in the summer of 1969 summed up the treadmill-like existence that Clodoaldo suddenly found himself facing. In just over two weeks, Santos squeezed in seven matches in four countries, criss-crossing Europe to fulfil lucrative contracts in Yugoslavia and Spain, England and Italy. Even by the standards of the day, their travel arrangements were arduous. The final leg of their tour involved leaving Sarajevo at 5 a.m. for Manchester, arriving at 11.45 p.m. that night, travelling for a match at Stoke the following evening, then on to London and a 3 a.m. flight to Genoa that night. The miracle of their tour was that they returned unbeaten.

Pele was the unquestioned star attraction, filling stadia wherever he travelled. Clodoaldo shakes his head quietly at the memories. ‘Some people wanted to touch him, some people wanted to kiss him. In some countries they kissed the ground he walked on,’ he says. ‘I thought it was beautiful, beautiful.’

Yet, just as on the streets of Sao Paulo, Clodoaldo refused to be intimidated by the exalted company he was now keeping. Once more he soaked up everything he saw and heard. And once more he fought every day of his working life. Sharing a dressing room with Pelé was, he admits, an inspirational experience. ‘I would have been a fool if I hadn’t profited by learning something from the greatest player of all time,’ he says, laughing quietly at himself. ‘I learned lessons every day.’

Pelé taught his resilient young colleague to use his eyes as well as his heart. ‘Pelé was always ahead of everyone in reasoning, speed and physical condition. One of his main virtues was that he observed everything – the supporters, the terraces, the goalkeeper, the work of the referee. If Pelé was without the ball he was observing. I learned very much about this aspect with Pelé.’

On the training pitch, Clodoaldo saw the extent of Pelé’s vision. He would regularly embarrass his team-mates by exposing their weaknesses. ‘When you were marking Pelé in training, he knew when he controlled the ball which was your worst side and that was the side which he should go to,’ Clodoaldo says. ‘He was always, always in front of everybody.’

Yet if Clodoaldo had a hero at Santos, it was the man who wore the club’s No. 5 rather than its No. 10 shirt. Zito – with Didi – had been Brazil’s midfield lynchpin in both Sweden and Chile. With his pencil moustache and brilliantined hairdo, Zito looked more like an Argentine tango crooner than a footballer. For a generation he had been the sheet anchor of both the Santos and Brazilian sides. Though perfectly capable of breaking forward and scoring – as he proved in the 1962 World Cup Final when he scored Brazil’s second and decisive goal – Zito’s genius lay in his tireless tackling and simple yet destructive distribution. He was the closest the Brazilian national side had to a conventional, English-style right half. ‘As a man, as a leader, he has always been a person that I have modelled myself on. He was a world champion and great example,’ says Clodoaldo of the mentor to whom he still talks on an almost daily basis.

Under Zito’s watchful eye, Clodoaldo had eased his way into the Santos first team by his seventeenth birthday. Soon the Sao Paulo press had earmarked the teenager as the great man’s heir apparent. By 1967, the torch had been passed on in a suitably symbolic scene. ‘Zito was the absolute owner of the No. 5 shirt,’ says Clodoaldo, recalling the most powerful and evocative moment of his young career. ‘It was a game against Portuguesa de Desportos and we were in the dressing room. Zito called me and the coach over and he said “Today, the No. 5 shirt belongs to Clodoaldo”. That day he played with the No. 8.’ His eyes well up with tears as he recalls the moment. ‘Every time that I remember that I become emotional,’ he says, his voice faltering.\

Rivellino – The Boy From Brooklin

Name: Roberto Rivellino

Born: January 1, 1946, Aclimacao, Sao Paulo

First Professional Club: Corinthians

 

Rivellino – The Boy From Brooklin

Rivellino was born in the Sao Paulo suburb of Aclimaçao on New Year’s Day, 1946 but grew up in the neighbouring district of Brooklin Paulistana.

In the 1950s, Sao Paulo was still a city of open spaces. As a kid Rivellino played his pelada at Ponte do Morumbi, an open area of full-sized pitches on the site of what is today Brazil’s second-biggest stadium, the vast, bowled, 150,000 capacity Morumbi stadium. ‘Those fields do not exist any more. Today I have this school because there is no space,’ he says, standing on one of the astroturf pitches at his academy in Sao Paulo.

It was at Ponte do Morumbi and on the pitches of the nearby Clube Atletico Indiano that Rivellino realized the ferocious power he could generate with his shooting. ‘I was born with that ability. I always hit the ball very strongly, it was something that God gave me,’ he says. One day one of his thunderbolts hit a school friend. ‘He was a kid who didn’t like to play that much,’ he recalls. The shot was so powerful it knocked the boy out. ‘He was unconscious for three days. My friends tortured me: “You have killed the guy”, “You will be arrested”. I cried,’ he admits.

He would not keep the habit for long, but Rivellino said prayers for his first footballing victim. He admits his devotion to the Catholic Church, where he was a coroinha, an altar boy, had less to do with faith than the free cinema tickets his priests used to bribe boys like him with.

‘If you went to Mass you won a ticket to see the serial the following Sunday. It was a beautiful childhood, I was a child of the streets in a good sense.’

It was away from the streets, within the confines of the five-a-side-style futebol de salao courts that Rivellino’s talent was spotted. When overseas coaches come to Brazil in search of the source of its natural born footballing skills, futebol de salao is invariably at the heart of the thesis they return home with. Played, usually indoors, on a hard pitch the size of a basketball court and with a ball that is smaller and heavier than normal, the game polishes the skills learned in the peladas. Players learn to think and act faster in the tight spaces. Control and technique are improved by the fact that the ball rarely leaves the floor. By the time the good salao player graduates to the full-size version, he should have a clear advantage.

Rivellino played for a city bank, BANESPA, where he quickly became a star of Sao Paulo’s futebol de salao league. As a boy with Italian blood in his family he was inevitably a Palmeirense, a supporter of the green and whites of Palmeiras, the club founded by Italian immigrants in the early decades of the century. When he shone against his boyhood favourites, in the final of a tournament, he could barely believe that the club’s coach, Mario Cavalini, invited him to join his training sessions. ‘We won and I played very well. I was fifteen,’ he says.

Cavalini was not the only one whose interests were aroused that fateful afternoon. Until then Roberto’s father Nicolino had been a rare spectator at his son’s games. In his day football was a third-class profession. ‘I was beaten for playing,’ he says. ‘I was invited several times to go to a big club, but my salary at the telephone company where I worked was higher.’ When he heard Roberto was a keen player he intervened.

Nicolino ran the Rivellino house with iron discipline. As a boy the talkative Roberto had the nickname curio, the name of a particularly loud songbird. On the streets Nicolino was happy to let him fly free. ‘A boy must be a moleque, he must play football in the streets, he must break windows,’ he smiles. But at home his word was absolute. ‘I cut his wings a lot,’ says Nicolino. ‘He was beaten a lot with a belt, as was his brother. I wanted their understanding, I wanted them to be good people, to see what life is like.’

When he saw the gifts his son had developed – and the money now available in the game – he became his son’s first unofficial manager. Roberto was happy to have his father take the reins. ‘He saw a lot of qualities in me so he motivated me very much,’ he says.
Word of Rivellino’s talent had spread to Palmeiras’ greatest rivals in Sao Paulo, Corinthians Paulista. When they made a more lucrative offer, Nicolino recommended Roberto follow his head rather than his heart. Roberto went on to wear the white and black of Corinthians Paulista for more than a decade.

Rivellino’s heroes were Didi, Chineisinho, the star of the Palmeiras side, and Jair da Rosa Pinto, a reserve in the Brazil squad of 1962 and a master of the dead ball situation at Portuguesa. Rivellino would spend hour after hour trying to replicate Jair’s lethal armoury of bater falta, free kicks.
His rise through the game in Sao Paulo was rapid. He was far from a one-trick pony. As well as his shooting skills he possessed a flair for Garrincha-like dribbling. Like the Joy of the People he revelled in handing out the humiliations his sleight of foot could inflict on defenders. Like his grandfather and father, he was also a fighter. His high-octane style soon made him a darling of the Corinthian crowds.

By 1965 he had been drafted into one of Feola’s squads preparing for England. He sat on the bench during the 5–0 thrashing of Hungary by a predominantly Paulista team at Morumbi. He would have to wait until after the disaster of Brazil’s disastrous 1966 World Cup campaign to win the first of his record 121 caps, however.

Watch Rivellino score against Czechoslovakia in Mexico 1970.

Reviews of The Beautiful Team by Garry Jenkins

“In hindsight it seems natural that (they) should have arrived in our living room the year after the first moon landing. They were, after Apollo11, the second great event of the new telecultural age.”

Garry Jenkins journey in search of Pelé and the 1970 Brazilians began when he was a 12 year old, living in a small village in West Wales, and dazzled by the images on his television.

The Mexico World Cup was the first to be widely broadcast in colour and multi-racial Brazil, brilliant in gold and blue against the bleached turf, embraced the new palette as if it had been created for them.

World Cup winners define successive epochs in the game and the way it is won. The casual brilliance of the Brazilians was the fullest expression to date of everything that is beautiful about the sport.

Jenkins meets the surviving titans and finds unexpected answers to the questions of how they came to play the way they did and why the world has waited in vain for the Brazilians to show us again the summits that can be reached by 11 men and a football.

Following their progress from ignominious defeat in the 1966 tournament to the legendary dismissal of Italy and the rest of the world four years later, Jenkins vividly recreates the games themselves, but it is the stories from off the pitch that make this a uniquely entertaining portrait.

This thoughtfully crafted work is infinitely richer than the usual, breathless homages to the team. A definitive tribute to the definitive 11. —Alex Hankin