STUTTGART, Germany (Reuters) – Brazil’s preparations for hosting the 2014 World Cup have been dogged by doubts over whether stadiums and airports will be ready in time, and their team is making equally slow progress. After Brazil’s unhappy quarter-final exit at the 2010 World Cup, new coach Mano Menezes, with the backing of the Brazilian public and the football federation, set about knocking everything down and starting again.
The plan was to move away from the physical, counter-attacking, win-at-all costs approach of his predecessor Dunga, back towards the inventive, attacking football associated with the yellow-shirted sides of the past.
Young prospects such as Neymar and elegant playmaker Paulo Henrique Ganso were drafted in while the likes of Felipe Melo, Gilberto Silva and Luiz Fabiano were shown the door.
But as Menezes admitted after his team lost 3-2 to Germany on Wednesday, knocking it down had been the easy part … creating something new was far more challenging.
“It’s a long road to travel and good intentions are not enough,” he told Brazilian reporters after Germany recorded a first win over the South Americans in 18 years.
“We would like to be better. In football, there are no miracles, we have to get past these stages. We played with three forwards and an attacking midfielder and we were still not as positive as we wanted to be.”
“Marking and destroying are easier, the creative part is more difficult, and here we are struggling,” he said. “It’s proving very difficult for us to create attacking moves.”
With the defeat following on the heels of last month’s disappointing Copa America performance, where Brazil lost on penalties to Paraguay in the quarter-finals and managed only one win at the tournament, pressure is mounting.
The Brazilian federation felt compelled to publicly back its coach afterwards and insisted everything was going to plan.
“I prefer the reality, even if it is tough, to illusion of results without consistency which could bring even greater losses in the future,” CBF president Ricardo Teixeira said on the confederation’s website.
“The work continues with the full confidence of the CBF.”
UNENVIABLE TASK
The laid-back and thoughtful Menezes, whose team have produced six wins, four draws and three defeats in 13 outings, has an unenviable task.
With the next World Cup on home soil, Brazilians expect their team to win at a canter, give the rest of the world a foot-balling lesson and claim a sixth world title.
Some even still talk about 1950, when Brazil also hosted the tournament and lost 2-1 to Uruguay in the decisive match, and how this was a chance to set the record straight 64 years later.
But on Wednesday, Brazil looked far from world beaters and Menezes admitted that the Germans, who fielded a team with an average age of less than 24, were an example of how it should be done.
“Our opponents always knew where each other were, they always had a defensive midfielder in the right place, they made everything difficult, we are far from reaching this degree of automation,” he said.
His big worry was that Brazil were depending on moments of individual inspiration rather than building attacks as a team.
