Full-back Danilo’s press conference was absolutely enlightening about the difficulty of playing in a World Cup after four years of amateurism: “I’ve always been very critical when you’re very amateur.”
It talks about the crisis that began during Covid’s Copa América, in Brazil in 2021, when the president of the CBF, Rogério Caboclo, decided to fulfill agreements with Jair Bolsonaro and Alejandro Dominguez, from Conmebol, against the wishes of all the players.
Caboclo fell, Ednaldo Rodrigues took over and, with him, the counting of water bottles and ice bags. The CBF regulated money in an essential structure for professional athletes.
Danilo used the metaphor of Chinese bamboo to say that the work, now serious, should bear fruit in the coming years. First, it is necessary to try to win the World Cup in the United States despite the team not yet being tactically mature.
The transformation needs to start against Haiti.
22 years ago, the team experienced a special day in Port-au-Prince, capital of the country in which the only revolution of slaves on the planet was victorious.
Haiti was experiencing a violent civil war and the population was able to exchange weapons for tickets to watch three goals by Ronaldinho Gaúcho, two by Roger Flores, one by Nilmar. The Peace Game with Brazil leading the UN mission for stabilization in the country left a legacy.
incent Fenel is a ride-hailing driver in New Jersey. He says he will support Brazil in the World Cup. Not for Haiti. His memory is of Ronaldinho Gaúcho’s team, which made his country exchange weapons for goals.
Haiti is the result of the only revolution that brought enslaved people to power, at the beginning of the 19th century. Napoleon Bonaparte sent more than 20 thousand soldiers to Port-au-Prince to regain control. There was greater resistance than the French government imagined and the war lasted until the summer.
Then an army of mosquitoes entered the battle and infected more than half of the French with yellow fever. Upset with the cost of the operation and the inevitable defeat, Napoleon gave up the incursion into America and accepted the US offer to buy Louisiana, a state whose name was given in reference to Louis 14 and which means “Land of Louis.”
The Haitian Revolution, won by the enslaved, created a blue and red flag, in two horizontal stripes. It’s the flag of France, without the white. No, without the white people.
Haiti lived with economic embargoes, one of the reasons it did not develop and its population was left exposed to hunger and civil war for decades.
Unlike the United States and France, Brazil is seen by Haitians as a friendly country. Especially that day when they exchanged weapons for tickets to watch Ronaldo and Ronaldinho Gaúcho.
This Friday, in Philadelphia, the team could well bring smiles to those who love good football, as it did in Port-au-Prince in the 2004 Peace Game.
LINK PRESENT: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access seven free accesses from any link per day. Just click the blue F below.
