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June 28/30, 2002
Kathleen Christison
The True Story of Resolution
242 or How the US Sold Out
the Palestinians
Cockburn / St. Clair
Death,
Juries and Scalia
Tarif Abboushi
Bush's
Double Standard
on Israel
N.D. Jayaprakash
Seething
with Rage:
The Palestinian Saga
Michael Yates
Taking
the Pledge:
Teachers and the Flag
Stephen Zunes
Bush's
Speech a Setback
for Peace
Walt Brasch
The Pledge
v. The Constitution
Cockburn / St. Clair
Strikers
as Terrorists?
Tom Ridge Calls Longshoremen
June 27, 2002
Ralph Nader
Reclaiming
Our Commons
Neve Gordon
Jerusalem
Under Attack
Robert Jensen
Alternative
Futures
David Vest
Darryl Kile's
Great Day
Gary Leupp
The Loya
Jirga Joke
Rahul Mahajan
Arafat
Says US Needs New Leadership; Calls for Fair Elections
June 26, 2002
Robert Fisk
Sharon as
Bush Speechwriter
Mokhiber / Weissman
Brokerman
June 25, 2002
Dave Marsh
The RIAA,
Library of Congress and the Web Pirates
Uri Avnery
Reform
Now!
Bahour / Dahan
Bush:
Off with Arafat's Head
Walt Brasch
Bush:
the Compassionate Exerciser
June 24, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Talkin'
About the F-Word
David Bates
Portland
Gets Dicked:
Cheney Does Oregon
Jo Freeman
Will
the War on Terror Follow the Path of the Cold War?
Tom Gorman
The Only
Thing "Generous" is the Propaganda
Bezhad Yaghmaian
Caught
Between Borders
in a Borderless World
Ben Sonnenberg
Ted
Hughes' Spell
June 22/23, 2002
Douglas Valentine
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
June 21, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil
Over England:
The Gaucho's Wild Ride
John Borowski
Stossel
and Disney's Crimes Against Nature
Chris Floyd
Southern
Cross: The US Takes Aim at Brazil
David Martin
Of Lies
and Oil: an interview with Rahul Mahajan
James T. Phillips
Serbian
Reservations:
Kosovo 2002
June 20, 2002
Chris Kromm
The South
at War: a Tour of the US Military/Industrial Complex
Jacob Levich
The War
on Terror is
Not a Suicide Pact
Mark Weisbrot
What
are They Doing to Argentina?
Jeffrey St. Clair
and Alexander Cockburn
Fire
Walk With Me:
Terry Lynn Barton and the Flames of Colorado
June 19, 2002
Gary Leupp
Red Targets in Terror War
Lenni Brenner
The Road
Forward for the
Palestinian Movement
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Cheney's Diary:
Cakewalking Through Minefields
Alexander Cockburn
The
Incredible Shrinking President
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July
1, 2002
Brazil
2 Germany 0
The Survivor and
the Stubborn Patriach
by Norman Madarasz
RIO DE JANEIRO Sporting a haircut to end all football haircuts,
Ronaldo -- a survivor -- brought Brazil the victory that four
years ago was stripped from its over-confident soul. After three
spectacular breaks in the first, the Milan Inter striker took
advantage of a loose rebound to put the Selection ahead. Shortly
thereafter, he sealed Brazil's victory when breaking free from
a scramble just outside of the penalty zone.
Luiz Felipe Scolari, Felipao or Big Phil,
had been criticized for stubbornly molding the Selection in the
mode of an Italian-Brazilian agrarian patriarch. Brushing aside
national pressure with the agility of one of the 4Rs, including
President Cardoso's own, he doggedly left out of this year's
Selection the saving grace of Brazil's leading scorer Romario,
star of the 1994 championship team.
With an ironsmith's impassibility, he
hammered together a team made up of mainly poor kids turned into
international stars in high-paying European clubs, but who, in
the process, had forgotten the collective principles of the Beautiful
Game. In doing so effectively, Big Phil welded back a nation
and their team in the aftermath of the mysterious fit Ronaldo
had suffered in Paris. The ensuing investigation of his relationship
with Nike led to a debacle in Brazil's professional football
associations, clearing him, but exposing a field below the pitch
of secret bank accounts, tax fraud and illegal commissions.
Yet by June 30, Brazil had become the
favorites to win the final of the 2002 World Cup. It saw the
Selection meet Germany for the first time in World Cup history
at Japan's Yokohama International Stadium in front of 69, 029
fans. Having charmed the Japanese, a majority of them donning
the green-and-yellow for the match, Brazil went on to stun Germany
through a solid stream of creative offensive tactics. Apart from
grinding the only game their opponents seemed to know how to
set up -- the technically perfect cross kick and header act they
had been using to effect -- every successive wave of whirling
forwards ground at the gut of the German technical mind.
The belly of the defensive wall was pierced,
individual players forced to pivot out of position, and goalkeeper
Oliver Kahn made to bend into positions his body now had trouble
predicting. Then a spinning midair twirl from a superb kick by
Kleberson in the closing minutes of the first beat Kahn over
his right shoulder only to batter against the bar for a thirty-yard
rebound that landed in empty space. It was then that Kahn seemed
to lose his self-assurance. If for no other reason, Brazil won
the game out of patience, returning in play after different play
to challenge the over-hyped top keeper of the tournament. As
it were, there were more, many more reasons behind their unequivocal
victory.
Pentacampeao! Brasil, Parabens!!
At 67 minutes, Rivaldo wound up for a
long shot from center position just outside of the penalty area.
Kahn dove ahead to trap it, but as he fell onto the ball, its
spin bounced it brutally against his upper chest and it fled
like a swordfish drawn too quickly to boat. Ronaldo, whose relentless
ball chasing had grown frenetic as the game drove on, did not
lose the opportunity. Swooping in on the rebound, he caught Kahn
still sprawled on the field from the save. The goalie had no
chance to recover as Ronaldo barreled the ball into the lower
left hand side of the net. Brazil 1-0. Back home, it seemed like
the South American country had vanished momentarily in a blur
of explosions, fireworks and smoke.
Then at 79 minutes, following a scramble
outside of the penalty zone, Ronaldo dug at a turnover controlled
by Kleberson and shuttled center toward Rivaldo, who let it roll
into the legs of three defensemen. With the desperate Gerald
Asamoah trying to fall over the ball in lost control, Ronaldo
stubbed it ahead, pivoted and snuck the ball past Kahn's left
hand side again. In the wake of the second goal, the Germans
were scrambling like a line of ants after seeing their scouts
get murdered. Their team had been psychologically wounded. For
the rest of the game, Brazil's defense merely acted like a mirror
to conjure the Germans' panic into a flipped image.
Heavily marked, both Rivaldo and Ronaldinho
were suffocating for most of the game - unfairly stripping the
former of most valuable player status. The claustrophobic treatment
only left Kleberson to perfect his art, in full bloom since the
brilliant victory against England in the quarterfinal. At the
outset of the tournament, Felipao had desperately tried to replace
Emerson, the team captain injured on the eve of the opener against
Turkey. But he stumbled upon his discovery of splitting the atom
into Kleberson and Gilberto Silva only by accident. The two midfielders
were instrumental in coalescing the tightest team playing Brazil
had seen when Ronaldinho was unfairly sent off in the second
of the quarterfinal thriller. Ever since then, as captain Cafu
and Roberto Carlos shuttled the ball up on the sides, the two
midfielders spun concentric circles in the center, turning rival
strikers into harried defensemen.
On Germany's side, leading scorer Miroslave
Klose was held to a fourth straight shutout, after having lead
the tournament with Ronaldo and Rivaldo for most goals scored.
Worse, he seemed to shift his attention away from the net and
toward players like Cafu, whom he kneed in the back without mention
from the otherwise superb referee, Pierluigi Collina. But when
he elbowed Edmilson in the face in a mid-air collision a few
minutes later, Germany's roughneck tactics were swiftly silenced
with a yellow card. To which Klose reacted two minutes later
in front of a disbelieving Collina by getting into some Rivaldo-inspired
theatrics, as he fell to the field on a pseudo-trip from Edmilson.
The opportunity of catching Klose's maneuvering
red-handed finally relieved the camera from its relentless tracking
of Rivaldo as if in expectation of more of his alleged cheating.
Rivaldo's self-justification of his misplace reaction after being
hit in the thigh by Hakan Unsal's unsportsmanly shot while waiting
to kick a corner in the opener against Turkey was met by the
anger only addressed to a magician who reveals the secret of
his tricks.
In a similar vein, David Beckham acted
out two spectacular falls in the penalty zone during the quarterfinal
against Brazil, which only the English press seemed to recognize
as worthy of the yellow card. It only proved that play-acting
is not the art in which Rivaldo excels, his antics standing out
more for their eccentricity than frequency. His detractors should
learn to recognized deception more acutely, especially when remaining
at the mercy of what only the cameras pick up and highlight in
replays.
"It is natural in Brazil that to
be second is to be last," Scolari lamented passionately
in the post-match press conference. In his brief but thoughtful
comments, he may have succeeded better than most in drawing the
ties between football, nationhood and international political
relations. This manifold is determined not by the justice of
who deserves to win over who does not. "The image of this
Selection is one of players' courage, care, love and friendship.
I'm not a politician, I don't like politics, but, by acting this
way, we will always make Brazil grow," he emotionally explained.
Football is not political because of the names of participating
nations and their victorious triumphs - these are minimal elements
of which only war is based. This game of football exceeds the
stupidity of human militarism by the group energy and psychological
coherence a team manages to create in the hopes that each side
gets its proper due with fortune's love and blessings.
Perhaps the most moving sight, perfectly
locked into Ronaldo's elated tear shedding after leaving the
field in the second, was Mario Zagalo's message to him on Brazil's
TV Globo post-match show. A futebol institution on his septuagenarian
feet, Zagalo was himself a scorer and key player in Brazil's
first World Cup victory in 1958, and notably went on to coach
the selection in their 1998 French campaign. Caught up in the
controversy surrounding Ronaldo's nervous convulsion on the eve
of the final, Zagalo spoke with the wisdom of history's corrective
brush.
Ronaldo, the 'fenomeno', spent two-and-a-half
years out, recuperating from a damaged knee ligament that required
surgery. He had barely recovered his level of fitness by the
time of the Selection's last friendly against Malaysia in May.
But Ronaldo seemed to react to Felipao's conviction that he would
be the key player once again, and surged forth to blaze the fifth
star on the Selection's tropical jersey. His eight goals were
the most scored by a World Cup tournament player since 1970,
and his total number of 12 has tied Pele's record. The ex-coach
gazing into the survivor's eyes through the television lens assured
him that 1998 had been corrected, and a long personal struggle
vanquished.
In what was hyped as a goalkeeper's dream
encounter, it would be sad to part on the note of Kahn's error
and failings. No sweetheart himself, Kahn does not deserve the
blame for his team's loss as much as Brazil's Marcos does for
its victory. For Brazil's outstanding offensive drive, played
out with the grace of curved patterns, would hardly have obtained
its style and distinction without the defense triangle's solid
summit. Marcos may have been less active since Lucio, Edmilson
and Roque Junior sealed the defensive cracks. By spectacularly
stopping two key German shots from Oliver Neuville and Oliver
Bierhoff, the keeper has been dubbed Sao Marcos in acknowledgement
that Brazilians especially know how to confer. In the end, the
five-time world champion team had no need for a savior like Romario,
just vastly talented and creative improvisers. In a brilliant
victory, the Green-and-Yellow has given the world again some
of the tropical flavor of a country named BRAZZZZILLLLLL.
Norman Madarasz
writes from Rio de Janeiro. He welcomes comments at normanmadarasz@hotmail.com
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