In Cuiabá, this ragged frontier town on the fringes of the Amazon, whose historic centre sits almost perfectly equidistant between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, first impressions don’t last long.
The city is squat and dusty, but heaving with life. It bakes during the day but comes alive at night under a cloudless sky, in small, leafy squares dotted with kiosks selling beer and tapioca crepes. The sun is relentless but the locals make it work in their favour, air-drying steak to make carne de sol, a Cuiaban specialty, and the surrounding region is threaded with rivers teeming with local fish such as caxara, pintado, pacu and pera putanga, creatures so removed from an ordinary notion of the piscatorial life it seems pointless to offer a translation of their names.
Even the trees in the Parque Mae Bonifacia to the city’s north, which appear stunted, are stunted for a reason, the compactness of their design an ingenious method of conserving water amid the famously molten heat.
The World Cup is always the season of the spurious analogy, and this World Cup in particular, the Copa das Copas, a footballing return to nature to tug at even the flintiest heart’s strings, coaxes us towards heights of lyricism more powerfully than any other in recent memory.
Virtually everyone has written off the Socceroos, and every day a new global media outlet steps forward with a fresh, data-assisted spin on the near-impossibility of their task. But Ange Postecoglou will surely be hoping that the disjuncture between appearance and reality, magically at work in the city that fans out around the Arena Pantanal, will somehow rub off on this Australian team, so easily cast aside in the global consciousness as a cute and willing band of friendly no-hopers.
The Socceroos take to the field on Friday night (8am Saturday AEST) in hope more than anything else, but the hope comes with a decent foothold in reasoned expectation. Performances in the warm-up games have traced an encouraging arc of improvement, and the starting XI now has a pleasantly settled, familiar look to it.
Graham Arnold may be getting ahead of himself with his suggestion of an imminent transfer to Real Madrid, but Mat Ryan is one of the world’s brightest young goalkeepers. In defence, Matthew Spiranovic and Alex Wilkinson have developed a man-forward, man-back synchronicity to their positioning that will be critical for the counter-attacking game Postecoglou wants to play, while Ivan Franjic has done a decent job of curbing his enthusiasm for the bombing run down the flank – a staple of his career at club level – and now has the self-possessed air of a player who feels he belongs at international level.
And in midfield, the mantle of captaincy plainly agrees with Mile Jedinak, who looks to be on the cusp of finally translating some of his club form to the national team, while Tommy Oar supplies the Socceroos’ one true jolt of on-field electricity.
The spine gives cause for optimism that Australia won’t be totally embarrassed, but in truth that optimism carries a heavy qualification. The real thing missing from this side is a sprinkling of stardust in the final third. Against Croatia the Socceroos were tight at the back and composed in midfield, but they struggled to unlock the Croatian defence once they made it to the edge of the penalty area.
Mark Bresciano, who is likely to start against Chile, still represents our most productive playmaking outlet, but his record at World Cup level is patchy at best and it will be a miracle if he can stay fit for all three group games. Perhaps Australia’s best hope is to lose the commitment, so patiently accumulated over the past decade, to the technical, one-touch game, to cast off the aspirational pass-and-move cosmopolitanism of the New Football era. The alternative is to Route 1 the ball towards Tim Cahill, who remains, even at 34, one of the best headers in world football, a galvanising, uplifting presence at the front of the line with an unflagging appetite for the fight and a forehead tailor-made for the type of game Australia will have to play. Where Cahill’s head goes, so go the Socceroos’ chances in Brazil.
For Australia, which has, in its short recent World Cup history, always travelled to the tournament more in need of early momentum than most, the first group match is always The Match That Must Be Won. In 2006 the plan worked, miraculously; in 2010, it failed, spectacularly. Chile is, in that sense, the most forgiving opponent to have first up, presenting Australia with the most winnable match of its group at precisely the stage when victory is at a premium.
One look at the Chilean team sheet, however, and it’s hard for much of that head-held-high, boys-are-excited, spring-a-surprise positivity not to evaporate. This isn’t just a story about Arturo Vidal, one of Serie A’s pre-eminent box-to-box midfielders. Chile, who play with three at the back, don’t bother much with defence, but between Valencia’s Eduardo Vargas, Barcelona’s Alexis Sánchez and Jorge Valdivia, the withdrawn No. 9 who figures as one of the most underrated players in the tournament, Chile have an attack to mess with the best defences.
And in Jorge Sampaoli, the Argentine most often compared to his compatriot and predecessor as Chile coach, Marcelo Bielsa, they have a coach unafraid to gamble, relentlessly, on the forward-thrusting ability of that attack. The contest between that front line and the inexperienced back four of Spiranovic, Wilkinson, Franjic and Jason Davidson is shaping as the World Cup’s first Thermopylae moment, a mismatch with virtually no limit.
Still, the boys are excited, their heads are held high, and they know they have the ability to spring a surprise. The team is in transition and the real goal, as has been exhaustively stated and restated by seemingly everyone in the Socceroos camp, is to put together the nucleus of a team that can win next year’s Asian Cup on home soil. At the carnival of football’s return to the heartland, the Socceroos are manning the stall of anchored expectations. The theme of this World Cup for Australia will be evolution and education, not revolution and celebration.
This is as true for Postecoglou himself, a kindred spirit of Sampaoli saddled with a vastly different task. Postecoglou: take a moment to listen to the musicality of that word. It spills out of the mouth, a forward roll of half-swallowed, humpty dumpty, run-on vowels enacting its own internal, tumbling, lavish momentum. As a club coach Postecoglou has been true to the onomatopoeia of his own name, forging a signature style built around speed, pressing, width and attack above all else.
As Socceroos coach, Postecoglou has kept a firm lid on his emotions in the months leading up to the World Cup, discarding the round, gabby volubility of the public persona he had built up with Brisbane Roar and Melbourne Victory and embracing something closer to the folded-arm surliness of Allan Border in his post-1989 captaining pomp. Via an extreme economy of words, through a grey veil of guarded praise, Postecoglou seems to want to convey the extreme discipline of the Socceroos’ set-up and preparation, the camp’s commitment to technical correctness over headless emotion.
This is perhaps no accident for a team whose simple ability to be organised, in defence as much as anywhere else, will play a big part in determining their fortune in Brazil. That’s the peculiarity of Postecoglou’s task in Brazil: his natural instinct is to flick the switch to attack, but he knows that against these opponents the task will be more about containment and opportunism on the break than flinging open the gates and setting loose the dogs of war.
The Socceroos will have to make their luck in the negative, by exploiting the spaces left behind by rivals of superior ability going forward. If Australian can’t Postecoglou to victory against Chile, they might yet Wilkinson their way to a spoiling draw – or, better yet, snatch, grab and Cahill a path to three of the unlikeliest points in the national team's history.
None of this matters much in the end, of course. It’s the World Cup. In Brazil. And we’re there. If that isn’t enough to excite Australia, nothing can. Bring on the sun-dried steak and the tapioca crepes; it's showtime on the edge of the Amazon.
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