end) at the World Cup, the first Brazilian to be
booked in the World Cup and he also scored a
decisive penalty. He trotted round in a corona
of attention, always demanding the ball, taking
every corner and free-kick, the demands of his
country that he should win them the World
Cup apparently loud in his ears. Yet this wasn’t
a convincing performance, either from Neymar
or Brazil.
This is supposed to be Neymar’s World Cup,
just as the Confederations Cup was Neymar’s
tournament. When the teams were read out
before kick-off, it was his name that got by far
the biggest cheer. He has largely been kept
under wraps by Brazil’s media machine, before
being chosen as the player to sit alongside Luiz
Felipe Scolari at the pre-match press-
conference. His performance there was
immensely impressive: relaxed, confident and
good-humoured – exactly what you’d hope for
from the king-in-waiting.
The importance of Scolari to him was evident:
at one point, the pair slapped hands after
combining in a typically weak, press-conference
joke; at another, as he seemed on the verge of
comparing himself to Romário and Ronaldo,
Scolari cuffed him lightly on the back of the
head, before covering for his intervention with
a mumbled gag about his haircut.
“The star player will be the champion because
if you’re the star player and don’t win the
World Cup, it doesn’t make sense,” Scolari said,
both a warning to Neymar that his fate is
bound up with the team and an
acknowledgement that this is expected to be
his coronation as part of a Brazilian triumph.
Bonding a team is one of Scolari’s great
strengths: having settled on a starting XI he
has barely altered it over the past months, the
spirit he has generated based on mutual
sacrifice. Hulk owes his popularity precisely to
that willingness to subjugate ego to team ethic
(at national level at least), and that was
perhaps why he operated largely on the left,
occupying Darijo Srna, as Neymar drifted
infield.
In the Confederations Cup it took Neymar just
three minutes to get off the mark, scoring with
a superb volley against Japan. He spoke this
week of how he wanted his “first goal” – for he
seems to have no doubt there will be multiple
goals – in the tournament to be “simple”,
preferably “without the goalkeeper”.
There was an early goal, after 29 minutes, but it
wasn’t easy, and it was to equalise rather than
to put Brazil ahead. Picking up the ball
centrally after energetic work from Oscar,
Neymar strode forward and clipped a low shot,
perhaps not entirely cleanly, through Dejan
Lovren’s legs, past the sprawl of Stipe Pletikosa
and in off a post.
His relief, and that of Brazil, was obvious, but
he was maybe a little fortunate still to be on
the pitch. Three minutes earlier, in leaping for
a high ball, he had thrust his forearm into the
throat of Luka Modric, having clearly glanced
at the Croatian first. There was not great force
in the outstretching of the arm, which is
presumably what persuaded Yuichi Nishimura,
a referee who was decidedly generous to Brazil
all night, that the offence did not constitute
violent conduct.
There had been flickers of Neymar’s ability
before that, notably one run in which he held
off Ivan Rakitic and cut the ball back just too
far from Paulinho for him to take advantage.
For the most part, though, Neymar’s evening
consisted in hopeful darts that led him into
thickets of Croatian legs, evidence both of the
energy and discipline of their closing down and
possibly also of a tendency for him to try too
much, as though the pressure to carry this
Brazil side caused him to overplay.
There was a backheel to nobody that he tried to
blame on Dani Alves, a moment when he
simply fell over, as though the weight of
expectation had simply proved too much, and
numerous collapses to the turf followed by
plaintive looks at Nishimura, who was usually
keen to oblige.
The desire for Neymar to succeed is bound up
in Brazil’s desire for him to become the best
player in the world – or, at the very least, a
better player than Lionel Messi. This, in a
sense, is a second chapter of the eternal Pele v
Maradona debate. In their ongoing tussle,
Maradona has had the better start to the
World Cup: whereas Pelé has been dismissed
as out of touch and conservative for his
criticism of the protestors, Maradona, as well
as doing a genuinely amusing turn as an
annoying armchair in an advert for the auction
site Bom Negocio on Brazilian TV, has been
pouring scorn on Brazil in general and Pelé in
particular. “Neymar today is Pelé,” he said. “In
Brazil he is built up, everyone looks to him –
you look forward and he is the big figure that
Brazilian football has. The distance between
Messi and Neymar is the same as the one
between Maradona and Pelé.”
Although for much of the game Neymar – in
impact if not appearance – resembled late-era
Maradona, showing glimmers of genius but
trying to do too much, and slowing the game
down as a result. With the pressure of the
opening game gone, he and Brazil should
improve, but they seemed too often a one-man
side, when they really ought not to be. They
will not always find referees as accommodating
as Nishimura. Neymar certainly lived up to his star billing with an action-packed performance as the hosts beat Croatia 3-1 on opening night in Sao Paulo.
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