SB Nation’s Jon Bois has a great video on 1980s baseball star Lonnie Smith, who won the World Series three times and then overcame a cocaine addiction to put together one of the greatest seasons in MLB history, but is instead remembered for failing to score the winning run in game 7 of the 1991 World Series because he lost track of the ball while rounding second base. Jon tries to talk through the play before he rewatches it to see if that’ll dull the pain, still so strong even after more than two decades. It, uh, doesn’t work:
“Go! GO! GO! FUCK! Go, go, go, go, go! Shit! Ah, holy shit. Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit, holy shit. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Ah, fuck.”
JON BOIS
Two decades from now, I think we’ll still be reacting to Croatia’s equalizer in pretty much the same way as Jon reacted to Lonnie Smith’s blunder.
Fuck.
Obviously, Bruno Petković’s goal is going to get a lot of attention in the days, weeks, months, years, and decades ahead. From a Brazilian perspective, the play was a fucking catastrophe. (This Twitter thread breaks it down pretty well and provides illustrative screenshots.) It starts with Pedro and Fred winning the ball high up the pitch and Pedro trying to play Fred through. Fred contests the ball with Joško Gvardiol, it bounces off of him, and before it can go out of play Dejan Lovren gets to it and hoofs it forward. Ivan Perišić heads it on, and then Danilo (who seemed like he might have been struggling with cramp) heads it forward under relatively little pressure.
This was, as Ali would call it, our fatal mistake. Danilo had the time to head it out of bounds, which might have bought us a couple of crucial seconds to get back in position. Instead, he headed it infield, looking for Pedro (who was indeed in acres of space if Danilo had gotten a little more zip on his header), but a Croatian (I want to say Lovro Majer) cuts it out and knocks it down to Luka Modrić.
From here until the ball hits the back of the net, there’s a lot of stuff you could chalk up to bad luck. Casemiro’s attempted steal ended up just going straight to Nikola Vlašić. Perhaps if he hadn’t gotten an iffy yellow card earlier, he wouldn’t have felt a tactical foul on Modrić was too risky and he could have stopped the play dead in its tracks. Either way, Croatia kept moving, but even then! Look at the replays, and Petković’s shot looked like it was just going to go straight down the middle, into Alisson’s arms. It got just the right deflection off Marquinhos to send it into the corner instead. Football is game of tiny margins and arbitrary bits of luck going for or against you, and I can’t help but think back to a free kick we had at the end of the first half, that took just the right deflection off a Croatian player in the wall to send it right into the arms of Dominik Livaković. Reverse that tiny bit of fortune, have that little nick send the ball spinning into the far corner and Marquinhos’ touch instead put it wide or just send it looping into Alisson’s arms, and the whole outcome changes. You could say the same about the penalty shout for handball we had that wasn’t given, or about a handful of great chances we had in regular time that came so close to slipping by the goalie. Fuck!
But talking about those little bits of chance is just deflecting from the bigger issues, the ones that manifested in Danilo’s header and our whole approach to the second half of extra time after Neymar had scored a wonderful goal to equal Pelé’s record and put us ahead at the end of the first half.
We were naïve.
We didn’t see the danger posed by a Croatian team that had played very well all game and was constantly reloading with fresh, fast players off the bench. We didn’t see the danger in pushing up the field instead of holding onto the ball and killing time. Danilo, specifically, didn’t see the danger in trying a risky forward pass when his team was stretched and out of position. (Incidentally, Danilo Will Come Good Island has sunk beneath the waves for good. Now it will only be referred to in hushed tones, like Atlantis, something nobody will ever be sure was more than a myth.)
But it wasn’t just that goal, or that half of extra time, that was naïve. It was Brazil’s whole approach to the game that betrayed a lack of understanding of the nature of the opposition and indeed the whole modern game, a fatal lack of physical, tactical, and mental preparation that started at the first whistle and was never addressed, let alone rectified. And for that, the buck ultimately stops with one man: Tite.
I’ve defended Brazil’s now-former coach in the past. I think he did a lot of good work with this team. But Friday was a massive, unforced L, a car crash of mistakes and oversights and unpreparedness that culminated in the enormous choke that was the end of extra time and penalties. Many individual players cracked and made mistakes, and obviously Rodrygo and Marquinhos missed their penalties. But they were put in a position to do so by Tite. How so? Let’s count the ways…
Starting With The Wrong Tactics
Tite was always more of a man-manager than a tactician, but he usually stuck to a pretty identifiable core tactical approach: make sure the team is defensively organized, that players have cover behind them when they go forward to attack, that if there isn’t an obvious path forward the team holds the ball, cycles it around, and probes for the next opening. There are a few other hallmarks, particularly his love of a “false midfielder” who runs into the box to score (à la Bad Paulinho), but while it was occasionally dull to watch, this approach made Brazil extremely hard to beat, and his emphasis on chemistry and interplay meant the goals were often spectacular.
Unfortunately, this obscured some real blind spots in his thinking. We’ve lamented for a while that he didn’t put enough emphasis on the midfield, and that reached its peak at this World Cup. I’ve taken to calling the formation Tite used at this World Cup the “screw the midfield” formation. In an attempt to fit all of Brazil’s best attacking talent on the field at once, he lined up the team throughout the tournament in what, at best, could be described as a 4-2-4 or 4-2-1-3, as in the lineup we used against Croatia.
In this formation, Neymar and Paquetá ostensibly functioned as “midfielders”, but Neymar isn’t exactly going to do a lot of defending or contesting 50/50 balls. Paquetá does more of that, and can definitely get pretty well stuck in, but he had plenty of license to come forward, which effectively left Casemiro as the only midfielder at times. Oddly, for a formation that seemed to be built around pressing and winning the ball high up the field to counteract that lack of a midfield, Brazil pressed very little during the World Cup. (Tite’s Brazil didn’t often press that much, but pressing was a definite feature of this formation when he debuted it against Ghana and Tunisia just two months before the World Cup, so we have to figure it was at one point an integral part of the plan.)
None of this had been a huge issue during our first four games, two of which were against the sort of European teams some of us had feared might expose these tactical shortcomings. But where those teams couldn’t do much about them, Croatia blew this system apart.
First of all, Croatia pressed high and marked us extremely well, while we hardly pressed them high at all. This seriously slowed down our buildup play, constantly forcing our players to pass the ball around the back rather than look for a forward option. On several occasions, even Alisson was forced into some very risky passes because Croatia had pressed so high up the pitch. This of course didn’t keep us from creating chances, but it did seriously slow us down, making it so that most of the chances we did create required threading the ball through an organized mass of Croatian bodies.
And when we lost the ball, without anybody truly backing him up on our side of the midfield, the trio of Modrić, Marcelo Brozović, and Mateo Kovačić were able to pass circles around Casemiro. The ease with which Croatia were able to keep possession for minutes at a time was often shocking. Sure, they didn’t do a ton with it in the final third, because our defensive spine was rock solid other than the goal we conceded, cutting out their attempts to actually play the ball into the box. But they unsettled and disrupted us far more than we managed to disrupt them, and even managed to just shade the possession game.
Here’s how a typical sequence of play went down in this game:
- Croatia enjoys a spell of possession that only gets broken up in the final third, by one of our defensive line.
- Marquinhos, Thiago Silva, etc. try to find a pass forward to start an attack, can’t because Croatia is pressing them. They pass the ball between them, maybe back to Alisson if the press is high enough. Eventually, they find enough space to play the ball forward again. Repeat this step ad nauseam.
- After great effort, Brazil gets the ball into the final third. We manage to either create a half-chance against the tight defense or see our shot/cross blocked or cleared. From here, one of two things happen:
- If Croatia have a goal kick or otherwise have the ball at their feet, one or two Brazilians make a half-hearted attempt to press the goalie or defense which they play around easily.
- If the ball is cleared or otherwise hanging in the air, Croatia wins what feels like every second ball. (Did anyone else notice this? Was it just me?)
- Croatia have possession again and we can’t get it back for another two fucking minutes.
Honestly, it reminds me quite a bit of the frustration of playing against Belgium last time. When Belgium cut out the ball after one of our chances, they were able to carry it far enough from goal that we wasted a ton of time and energy trying to get it back. In that game, it seemed like more a product of the speed and size of the Belgians up against diminutive players like Marcelo and Fagner. Romelu Lukaku was able to bulldoze his way towards the corner flag and waste tons of time. Croatia are a pretty tall team, but they’re not nearly as tall nor fast. Their success was based more around to how intelligent they were about applying pressure. (But they did also win what felt like a mystifying amount of second balls.)
Again, we still created enough chances to win both of these games. But Croatia actually did arguably a better job of keeping us from applying consistent pressure than Belgium did. We had more shots in the second half alone against Belgium than we did in the entirety of the first 90 minutes against Croatia. We had three very good chances to score in the second half, but about ten minutes passed between each. In that stretch, from the 55th to 76th minute, we only created five shots in total. We created our three best chances to win the game against Belgium—Renato Augusto’s goal, his miss from the edge of the box, and Coutinho’s miss from about the penalty spot—in only about eight minutes, and we had other good chances either side of that, which can’t be said about Friday’s game.
And, again, our approach to both these games was naïve. Tite didn’t seem like he had planned for the Belgians’ physical dominance against our smaller players in 2018, and this year, he didn’t just misjudge how little Casemiro could do on his own against a proper midfield—it’s like he didn’t see it happening in real time.
I’m glad that it took me until after the Argentina-Croatia semifinal to finish writing this, because that game threw our tactical ineptitude into sharp relief. Where Croatia were able to press our nonexistent midfield into constantly cycling the ball back to the defense, Argentina had the numbers in midfield to play through the press and get the ball to the forwards. Did we even once manage to create a chance by catching the Croatian defense off guard and disorganized? I don’t think so. And yet Argentina did just that in taking the lead. Nicolás Otamendi played the ball from the back to Enzo Fernández, who, because he wasn’t the only midfielder, wasn’t so tightly marked that he couldn’t quickly turn and play in Julián Álvarez, who had stretched the Croatian center-backs, went 1v1 against the keeper, and won a penalty. Even for the second goal, they were incredibly quick to launch a counter from a Croatian corner. In both cases, they benefited from a little bit of the sort of luck that easily could have gone our way (for the first one, Otamendi’s pass didn’t get enough of a Croatian touch on it to turn it over and Álvarez maybe was no longer in control of the ball when Livaković caught him; for the second, Álvarez benefited from two different Croatian clearances just rebounding right back into his path), but the fact remains that they were putting their attackers clean through where we were laboring to open up the slightest bit of space for ours.
Fuck.
In fact, a consistent problem with Tite’s Brazil was the often treacly-slow tempo of the buildup play, punctuated only by occasional lightning-fast combinations that produced many of the team’s most memorable goals. You would have thought that having four forwards and a high press would negate that, and it probably would, but, uh, you kinda need the high press part for that approach to work, and that was barely a thing at the World Cup. (Argentina also were better about this than we were, regularly dispossessing Croatia much higher up the field than we could.)
Not Reacting Enough To The Situation On The Field
Tite had set up Brazil in a way that let Croatia constrain and hassle them, but that was hardly the end of the world. It was obvious that the starting formation was struggling in midfield and in getting the ball into the attack quickly. We weren’t conceding too many chances, but letting Croatia knock around the ball with ease was asking for trouble. The problem is that Tite did precious little to change the situation on the field. Yes, whatever pep talk and instructions he gave at halftime did help, as the team created many more chances in the second half, but he never changed Brazil’s overall approach. The Croatians kept passing the ball around the helpless Casemiro and slowing our buildup play with their press, and Tite never thought to change the formation on the field.
What could he have changed? The obvious remedy, at least to me, was to get another midfielder in there, replacing either one of the forwards or Paquetá himself, who was not having much success in the midfield battle. This could have helped Brazil win the ball higher up the pitch and avoid being pressed into passing the ball back to the center-backs, both of which would have made it easier to quickly get the ball to the forwards and created more and probably better chances, as the Croatian defense would have more likely been stretched and disorganized. Even Fred, short as he is, might well have improved matters if he’d sat alongside Casemiro and offered him passing options while helping him fight for the ball.
But Tite also erred in how he handled the substitutions he did make. His three regular-time substitutions were simply to replace the three starting forwards – Vini Jr. made way for Rodrygo, Richarlison for Pedro, Raphinha for Antony. I don’t think any of the players who came on played badly, necessarily, but I’m not sure any of them actually changed the game state except, maybe, to tilt it further in Croatia’s favor. (Yes, Brazil, created more chances in the second half, but I think that was mostly down to the team talk, not to anything these three did.)
Subbing off Richarlison, unfortunately, sounds like it was a necessity, as he’d picked up a calf injury during the game. Richarlison had barely seen the ball (he only completed 7 of 13 passes in 84 minutes, and his only shot was a header that went off target), but he had been devastatingly effective with it. Four of those seven passes resulted in shots, two of them slipping Neymar through for the big chances he missed. It thus made sense to bring Pedro on to keep playing that same role, and I think Pedro was fine in his time on the pitch, other than maybe playing that naïve pass to Fred before the goal instead of trying to look for the corner or draw a foul.
Perhaps that should have been when Tite finally put on another midfielder, though, because his other like-for-like swaps had changed desperately little. Look at Croatia’s passing down the left side before Antony came on at 56 minutes…
…and after. I thought Antony played pretty well, probably his best game of the tournament, but it seems like even as his inclusion coincided with more pressure on the Croatian midfield and back line (look at how many more passes they had to attempt near their own goal), it also invited more Croatian forays down the left (doubly so once Éder Militão came off and Danilo shifted to right-back in the final 15 minutes; quite a few of those touches in the top right corner came just in that spell, but even if you leave them out Croatia definitely had more joy down the left after Antony came on).
Vini Jr. came off eight minutes later for Rodrygo, and I think you can see the difference there in these images too; Croatia didn’t have to sit quite as deep down the right side after he came off. Rodrygo is a great young talent, but he’s not nearly the athletic menace that VJ is. VJ hadn’t had a particularly good game, but it was odd to bring him off so soon, and we really could have used his pace in extra time.
After Neymar scored in extra time, Tite brought on Alex Sandro for the ailing Militão and Fred for Paquetá and shifted Danilo to right-back, which immediately resulted in Croatia targeting him and attacking more down their left, as mentioned before, and the goal ultimately came down that side. I think Fred would have been an okay choice to put in midfield in regular time, but here, I’m not sure it made a ton of sense. We needed to cover the defense, and while winning balls high up the field is part of that, and Fred did indeed do so just before Croatia’s goal, he didn’t have the good sense to not then make the heroic run forward. Another big, strong presence anchoring the midfield, like Fabinho or Bruno Guimarães, would probably have made more sense. (In fairness to Tite, Bruno looked so nervous in his previous two appearances that I’m not sure I would have trusted him in a pressure situation like this.)
It’s also worth noting that teams were allowed a sixth substitution in extra time, which Tite could have used after the equalizer to bring on a penalty specialist like Fabinho. (As far as I can understand the rules, he hadn’t run into the limit on “substitution windows”, as the double change that brought on Alex Sandro and Fred was at the halftime of extra time, which still left us with one opportunity to use.) Heck, he could have brought on Fabinho, or Bremer, or Bruno, or anybody else tall, once it became apparent that Danilo and Militão were suffering from cramp. Or he could have even brought on Gabriel Martinelli, whose pace and fresh legs would have made for an extremely effective outlet.
Being Unprepared For Extra Time
While Brazil has played in one penalty shootout under Tite—against Paraguay in the 2019 Copa América—he’s never had to lead the team through extra time. Indeed, I’m not sure he’d coached a team in extra time in any form since the 2008 Copa Sudamericana final. That’s not a problem in and of itself; extra time is pretty rare. But it really did seem like he didn’t know what he wanted Brazil to do once the game passed 90 minutes, and especially not once we scored. Brazil had to sit back and defend a lead for just 15 minutes, and they’d done it before. Consider the match against Argentina at the 2019 Copa América, where we were outplayed for most of the game but successfully closed out a 2-0 win. Or the CA games against Peru in 2019 and Chile in 2021, where we hung on to a one-goal lead for long periods after Gabriel Jesus got sent off.
Why the heck couldn’t we just do that? We were smart in those games! We wasted time in the corners! We used Neymar as an outlet! (What would have happened if Tite had saved one of his attacking substitutions until later instead of subbing off the three starters during regulation, and particularly taking off Vini Jr. after 64 minutes?) Hell, isn’t this sort of shithousing the sort of thing South American football is legendary for? Neymar, Danilo, and Alex Sandro all won a Copa Libertadores together by holding on to a one-goal lead for 15 minutes. Fuck! Perhaps the difference on Friday was the extra exhaustion of the game being in extra time, but that just leads into to my next point.
Before that, though, I want to note that I for one thought things were doomed when the game went to penalties. I don’t actually put too much of this on Tite, though he did err in not putting on another penalty specialist and in letting Rodrygo take the first penalty instead of insisting that Neymar, as his miss set the tone. Croatia are so battle-hardened in penalty shootouts, having now won five of them across the last two World Cups, that it seems to have given them a lasting advantage. (Still, that’s all more reason to start with your best penalty taker, to give you the best chance of not putting yourself in a demoralizing hole with the very first kick.) Add to that the simple fact that conceding the late equalizer was so mentally crushing, and our odds of prevailing in the shootout were surely much worse than a coin flip.
Not Preparing The Team Physically Or Mentally
I don’t want to spend too much time on the broader/more systemic failures of Tite or Brazil in recent times, but I had to mention this. I noted after the loss in 2018 that Tite seemed to have a blind spot for the importance of physicality in the modern game, selecting a bunch of diminutive forwards and fullbacks and leaving some of our biggest, strongest players out of the team entirely. That take was too limited in retrospect. Tite’s problem with physicality, and physical preparation in general, seems to be far bigger. There seems to have been something rotten with the entire way he prepared the team physically in both 2018 and 2022. Both times, we saw players struggle with or suffer injuries after joining up with the team. Richarlison’s injury against Croatia was at least the sixth Brazil had suffered at the World Cup that was serious enough to take or keep a player out of a game (In just five games! We didn’t even play any friendlies beforehand!), a figure wildly beyond anything I can remember in past editions.
And this time, as thinkingplague pointed out, despite having essentially played a game and a half less than Croatia thanks to being able to rest all the starters against Cameroon and walking through the second half against South Korea, it was Croatia who were running all over the pitch, Croatia who were burning us for pace to a surprising degree (did anyone else see Vini Jr. struggle to keep up with Josip Juranović in the first half?), Croatia who still looked fresh and hale after 110 minutes of play while our players were gasping for breath and cramping up.
(And, once again, why commit so hard to a “screw the midfield” formation that seems dependent on pressing if you don’t expect your players to be physically able to press on the regular? I don’t see how Brazil could have pressed if not pressing was this draining.)
Let’s also spare a word for another important point: Tite opted not to bring a sports psychologist to Qatar, going against what is now common practice for any professional sport, and instead positioning himself as the source of emotional support for his 26 players. The issues here are obvious. Even if Tite is every bit as good at counseling athletes as a dedicated professional (unlikely), it was another thing on his plate keeping him from, say, making sure he has a coherent plan for how to kill a game in extra time. There’s a reason why there’s so much delegation of responsibility in high-level athletics! I don’t know how much this absence specifically cost Brazil against Croatia—like, I don’t think the players were pushing up the field because they were panicking about wanting to extend the lead, I think they were pushing up because they didn’t have a clear idea about how to kill the clock otherwise. Maybe it hurt us in the penalty shootout, but there’s only so much a psychologist could have done after the gut punch of conceding a goal that late to a team that’s already so tough to beat in shootouts.
FUUUUCK!
I think what makes this loss sting so much worse than some of Brazil’s other World Cup defeats is that we had a taste of joy so soon before it was taken away. The only past time we’d taken a lead in these defeats was against the Netherlands in 2010 (a damning stat in and of itself), but that was early in the game and the tables turned bit-by-bit in our second-half collapse. We never led against France in 2006 or Belgium in 2018, though we could hold onto hope until the end that we might find a way back into the game. Germany 2014, well.
In every one of those games (except 2014), there were moments when we could have scored, could have taken or extended a lead, but didn’t. And there were moments against Croatia when we could have done the same, and potentially killed the game in just 90 minutes.
But we did get that goal eventually. And oh, what a goal. What a tragedy that this masterpiece, such a fitting way for Neymar to match Pelé’s record of 77 goals for Brazil, ended up meaning nothing. It’s heartbreaking in a totally different way than Renato Augusto and Coutinho shanking potential equalizers, or Thibaut Courtois just saving Neymar’s last-ditch curler, in 2018. And Pelé himself is battling cancer! Even though the stories that he’s been moved to palliative care may not be true, we can’t count on him making it three and a half years to the next World Cup. This might well have been the last opportunity for him to witness Brazil winning another World Cup.
Fuck.
It’s the sort of loss that makes you question whether it’s worth following a team that only seems capable of hurting you these days. It’s the sort of loss that makes you wish there was a “Why Your Team Sucks” for soccer, so that you could vent about Brazil there. It’s the sort of loss that makes you think crazy thoughts like, “maybe having the World Cup every two years isn’t such a bad idea.” I don’t know if there’s any consolation I can offer in the short term, especially if we end up having to choose between rooting for France and Argentina in the final. I’m crushed too. And things like who the next coach will be and where the Seleção goes from here are beyond the scope of this piece.
If there is one actual positive that we can take away from this campaign, though, it’s that it seems like it did quite a lot of good as far as repatriating Brazilian football’s image. A lot of neutrals turned against Brazil for the seeming favoritism they received from the refs in 2014 (which I still think was really just that one penalty in our favor in the opening game) and for Neymar’s endless rolling on the ground in 2018. This time around, while some people rightly gave Neymar shit for his open support of Jair Bolsonaro, it seemed like a lot of people got on board with Brazil’s generally clean standard of play, the beautiful goals they did score, and the party atmosphere of the dances and celebrations against South Korea in particular.
There’s a lot more I want to say about this World Cup, this whole cycle under Tite, and what’s coming next, but I’ll save that for a separate post or three.
❤️ 🇧🇷 ⚽
I want to conclude with some words of appreciation for all of you who frequent this blog. It was really heartening to see so many long-time commenters return, and so many lurkers come out of the woodwork to comment for the first time, during this World Cup. It’s fantastic to know that even as life threw more important things at you than commenting on a soccer blog, you all kept this place in mind. I know a loss this crushing is going to be a very tough one to swallow, and that indeed it might even drive some of you to step back, even rethink your relationship to the Seleção. I just hope we’ll see all of you again, even if it isn’t for some time. I certainly plan to be here when you return.
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