Let's lighten up and get in touch with our inner Brazilian

Nicky Campbell
Thursday June 29, 2006
The Guardian

In Stuttgart I saw a group of 15 Aussies stumbling towards the stadium all wearing T-shirts bearing the Wildean epigram "I'll show you my Australian if you show me your Brazilian". Laddish Aussies? The truth is you can't escape national stereotypes at the World Cup because fans fervently play up their own and become walking, chanting caricatures. For the Brits this offers a depersonalised comfort zone where individualism yields to an uncomplicated herd-and-nerd mentality, a projection of ourselves at our incurious worst.

That is part of the fun, I guess, but for the English as a whole it is also part of the problem. That laced-up self-consciousness, exorcised only by booze, and deep suspicion of the unorthodox pervade national life and national game in subtle but significant ways.

In My Fair Lady, Rex Harrison declaimed: "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" Well, why can't the English be more like Brazil? Why can't they play with just a little of that joy, exuberance and elan that, married to our traditional virtues of courage, commitment and passion, would not only have annihilated Ecuador but conquered the world enough times to secure Jules Rimet a permanently gleaming place in an English display cabinet?

If I had a euro for every Brazilian fan who has told me that their magic stems from "the rhythm in their soul" I could have bought a round for the whole BBC team out here. Not all the sambatastic Brazilian fans here in Germany qualify for the Copa version of Baywatch; there are plenty who could easily pass for Croydon car-park attendants. But, when those drumbeats beat, boy do they move like snakes in the sun. The concept of the embarrassing uncle dancing at a wedding is alien in Rio. Despite or because of their enormous social problems, joy is the key of life and it is a state of mind that kicks in the moment they kick off. But it is in the mind not the genes.

Alex Bellos, the author of Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life, told me that in the UK kids' football is not about having fun. "It is all about getting healthy and being part of a team. In Brazil it is all about fun from the earliest age - you have the ball and that ball is your best friend."

Clearly there is more to it than just getting Peter Crouch on to Strictly Come Dancing. We don't need a cultural revolution, just a slight loosening of our own self-imposed straitjackets, but if we could do that - Roberto's your uncle.

The pleasure principle that pervades their country and their football reveals itself in interesting ways. Ricardo Setyon, the team's former communications director, told me: "Once the players arrive in the Brazil camp from their clubs it is all joking and hugging and playing and there is not a single moment of not having pleasure. They are home again."

What they have done so successfully over the past 15 years is marry this irresistible ethos to discipline, power and tactics - a process helped by having so many Europe-based players. "After 1970 we didn't win anything for 24 years because we were too Brazilian," said Ricardo. "But then we changed. We took from you and you have to take from us. Play more free, play more with love."

The answer is deceptively simple. The BBC's chief football correspondent Mike Ingham said it the other day: "England need to lighten up."

Wouldn't it be great if we, like them, could get the best of both worlds, the best of both hemispheres? "I'll show you my English and I'll show you my Brazilian too."