Guilt and Responsibility!

The Brazilian Team after Confederations Cup!

You can only imagine what is going on in Brazil if your country ever lost a World Cup played at home and your national sport is FOOTBALL! The witch hunt is on! The media keep asking "How is the guilty one?" "Who did not do what was supposed to do?" and so on!

So I think we should first look into guilt and responsibility.

Guilty is a position where someone puts himself by doing intentionally something knowingly to be wrong! So I am guilty if I kill someone, rob a bank and so for! Sure I am also responsible for it!  So in this case guilty and responsibility are irreparable linked!

But here are cases where responsibility is not link to guilty! In my opinion this is the case in the Brazilian lost to Germany! Sure 7:1 is a score that hurts deeply but I don't believe for a second that because of one single game we destroyed 100 years of history! We are still the very best football country in the world! There are lots of numbers to support it! Just looks at Pelé's numbers and compare it to any player! See our t-shirt and counts the stars! There are FIVE!!

Responsibility is a characteristic that fewer persons are showing these days! There is a tendency to blame someone else for what went wrong! The problem with this position is that no one is willing to put himself in a position of decision making. Here a person takes a decision with the best information he had at the time and in the true believe that his actions will lead to a successful end. 

Our Head Coach, Luiz Felipe Scolari (Felipão as he is know in Brazil!) has taken the right path and taken the responsibility for the disaster! Sure this responsibility is share by the team, not just players, the team includes the technical commission as well! Here in Brazil we have 200 million head coaches and I am one of them! In my opinion Felipão was Felipão! He is a head coach that has won many state and national championships, won the 2002 World Cup in Japan/Korea and is clearly a Cup's Coach! Felipão does not play safe, does not play for a result that is not victory! Everybody in Brazil knew it! We love and admire him for it!

So now that his style has produced a catastrophe, some people in Brazil are blaming him! Telling that he the guilty man!

I am sure that most of my friends and colleagues will not share this point of view, but to me HE IS RESPONSIBLE! NOT GUILTY! 

Felipão is responsible for believing that in his team had a player (normally the captain) that in the case of bad start (soffer a goal) could calm down the rest of the team and taking the necessary breaths to re-start the game in a disadvantageous situation! Felipão believed that this player was Thiago Silva, but wait, Thiago was out of the game! So was Neymar, our brightest start! So a more careful head coach would probably put in Paulinho instead of Bernard! Paulinho plays protecting more the defence where Bernard plays more for the attach!

Clearly the game was asking for a more defencive approach! But it is quite easy for me to say it now! 7:1 irrevocably supports it! So lessons were learned, painful ones! But in 2018 we will be in Russia with a 

Vengeance!!

All the best,