WORLD CUP USA ‘94: SEMIFINALS : Samba Doesn’t Need Harmony

It was like a battleship sinking a rowboat--and taking all day to do it. A lion eating a canary but getting a toothache in the process.

Brazil beat Sweden, 1-0. But the Brazilians should be ashamed of themselves. It was like a firing squad that kept missing the guy in the blindfold. Talk about the tortoise and the hare.

Brazil looked as if it had many more players on the field than Sweden and, finally, it did. That came when the Swedish captain got red-carded (given the bum’s rush) for some arcane infraction.

Sweden was bigger, slower and blonder. They had great patience. But that’s not much good in a fight. Even after the game, the Swedish coach, Tommy Svensson, admitted, “I must recognize we lost to a much better team.” The Swedes looked like a guy plugging leaks in a crumbling dike. Their goalkeeper must have thought it was raining balls.

I had a disadvantaged view of the game. I was seated behind a giant television set whose picture was hard to see in the light, so, most of the game, I could see only half a field. For the first half, I thought the Swedes hadn’t even showed up. They were never in the part of the pitch I could see. Brazil had the ball most of the day. The only guy on the Swedish team who got to touch it was the goalkeeper.

I am glad to be able to hail it as just another victory for disharmony. A blow against team spirit.

Well, when you stop to think about it, Ruth and Gehrig didn’t speak to each other for years. Didn’t stop the Yankees from winning pennant after pennant. Tinker and Evers of the famous Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance combination didn’t speak either. Didn’t stop them from making double plays. They wrote poems about those.

The Oakland A’s of the early ‘70s used to fight each other in the clubhouse before the game. Then they went out with black eyes and won three World Series in a row.

So, there really wasn’t any reason for panic under Sugar Loaf Mountain in Rio or reason for the girl from Ipanema to cry because the two star Brazilian players, the Ruth and Gehrig of World Cup soccer, Bebeto and Romario, didn’t like each other.

Ordinarily, this wouldn’t warm the cockles of a manager’s heart. It’s all very well in baseball, which isn’t, after all, a team game so much as a series of solos. But you would think that in World Cup soccer the strikers and sweepers had to get along with each other.

Romario was on the record as having given teammate Bebeto a nickname--the Portuguese word for “crybaby.” Then he announced on the eve of the Brazilian team’s departure for the World Cup that he wouldn’t fly with Bebeto. He didn’t particularly want to be in the same country as Bebeto, never mind the same plane.

The problem was that, between World Cups, they were big rivals on competing teams in Spain. It was Nicklaus against Palmer, Dempsey-Tunney. They weren’t buddies, they were competitors. No love lost.

But then came the World Cup. You might not want to invite Bebeto and Romario to the same party, but on the same team they do nicely, thank you.

They are the scourge of the competition, the Two Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Murder and Mayhem. The Boys from Brazil.

Brazil has scored 11 goals in this tournament. And Romario and Bebeto--1 and 1A--have scored eight of them. It was Romario who headed in the winning goal Wednesday--in the 81st minute of the game. If he doesn’t get his head in the way of that ball, they might still be playing. “He got in a very good performance with his head,” Sweden’s goalkeeper was to say.

Romario (full name: Romario de Souza Farias) is not otherwise noted for good performances of the head.

Romario is what would be called in our country a “flake.” First of all, he wasn’t married at home plate like our resident flakes but he was married at the penalty kick line in the stadium.

Romario likes the penalty line. He spends a lot of his game there. He lets Bebeto and the other guys go back and bring up the ball. “Sometimes people think I am asleep,” he once observed.

Sometimes he is. He probably took too many shots to the head, but Romario is famous on three continents for his formidable eccentricity. He has been known to have trouble getting interested in a game when he doesn’t have the ball. And sometimes even when he has the ball. His teammates have been known to complain.

Soccer players are itinerant peddlers shopping their wares--the ability to kick a round ball with reasonable accuracy in any direction including back over their heads--to the highest bidder. Soccer players are like watchmakers or diamond cutters. Not everyone is willing to invest the time to get good at what they do. So they’re in great demand.

Romario and Bebeto (his real handle is Jose Roberto Gama de Oliveira, so the press is glad he has any nickname) are now the Terrible Twosome of the tournament. On the same team, they constitute a monopoly, a restraint of trade. God help Italy, which has only a Baggio or two to handle them.

Romario is celebrated for hanging a left hook on the jaw of a rival player in the Spanish league this January. He had to jump to do it. He’s only 5 feet 6.

Bebeto is bigger, rangier and, in general, happier--or less temperamental--than Romario.

The two had a celebrated reconciliation of sorts for purposes of solidarity on the team.

But they didn’t really need it. It’s hard to improve on getting to the edge of winning the World Cup. No one said you had to like each other. The Swedes are one big happy family. That might be their trouble right there. They stick together. Down around their goal line. They might need somebody who sulks if he doesn’t get the ball. Or calls a news conference to announce he won’t ride on the team plane with anyone who won’t get it to him. A little feud may not be all that bad for the team. Just ask the Oakland A’s. Or the ’27 Yankees. Love is overrated as a team strategy.