Brazilians maintain old order in new era

Four Goals, fine fare and vast splashes of yellow and blue in the stands of the Parc des Princes were redolent of the most authentic scenario in international football.

Brazil, the supreme entertainers, were delivering on their heritage, and reports of their demise as the most awesome team in the game were shown to be premature.

Or were they ?

Nobody, not even Marcelo Salas, perceived as posing the biggest threat to the champions on Saturday, was questioning either their application or authority as they clinically dismantled Chile.

"How do you hold back the tide?" mused Salas. "We competed well but it's very hard to play against people like Ronaldo or Cesar Sampaio. They can score at any time and suddenly the game is changed.

"Perhaps we can come back in four years and do better. But tonight we weren't strong enough. And now, you ask, who will stop Brazil?"

A pertinent question which, I suspect, will extract a pertinent answer from Argentina. And yet, even as they ran all over the hapless Chileans in the second half, there were vague mutterings of changed and changing priorities in Mario Zagallo's match strategy.

Rivaldo, slaloming his way through the defence, mesmerised players and spectators alike in one enthralling passage of play but otherwise there was little evidence of the exciting, effervescent football which was the badge of the Brazilians. The glory days when Garrincha, Zico and the peerless Pele danced their way through opposing defences are gone and, with them, the ethos of an era.

Now pragmatism is king and in their conversion to the give-and-go game, pace and running power are paramount, sleight of football a relic of a lost generation.

Ronaldo, the most celebrated of the modern breed, makes the point well. Built like a young Carl Lewis, he is identified here for those moments when he turned Colin Hendry so often in their opening game against Scotland that the Blackburn defender may well have had a mild attack of the staggers.

The evidence since, however, has been less than imposing. Strength and explosive acceleration over five yards have been the dominant characteristics of his game and if it earned him two goals in this, their initial venture into knockout competition here, it was scarcely intimidating enough to suggest that he will wreak similar havoc against better organised defences in the games ahead.

In another telling commentary on the quality of Saturday's performance, three of the Brazilians' four goals derived from set-pieces in what amounted to more of an indictment of Chile's fallibility in central defence than a testimony to the champions' creative skills. And yet Zagallo pronounced himself "very happy" with their display.

"We played to win at all times and that was the big difference," he said in an oblique reference to the losers' lack of resolve after they had dropped behind in the 22nd minute.

"Tonight I went back to my first thoughts when I selected my team and chose experienced players. We had strength in very position and that was the difference between the teams."

One of those recalled was Sampaio, who scarcely enhances the image of Brazilians as the most artistic of ball players. Against Scotland, he scored with a deflection from his shoulder and it was the same combination of power and perception which brought him the opening two goals against Chile.

His first, a perfectly executed header after he had got in behind defenders who were preoccupied, it seemed, with Ronaldo's presence at the edge of the six-yard area, was an object lesson in opportunism. His second strike, on 27 minutes, owed more to luck than enterprise after Roberto Carlos's free kick had crashed against the wall. The effect was to kill off any chance of Chile saving the game.

Ronaldo was brought down by goalkeeper Nelson Tapia for the penalty which he converted in injury-time and then, after striking a post early in the second half, in the 70th minute he was out of the blocks like a sprinter to make contact with Leonardo's pass before shooting across Tapia to bring up the fourth goal.

In between, Salas, adjusting his body like a contortionist to align himself with the rebound when Ivan Zamorano's header was parried by Tafferel, got one back for Chile. It proved but a fleeting moment of prosperity for a team fated to live in the shadow of their South American neighbours and, now, resigned to the inevitable on an evening when the old order was never likely to be revised.