It’s obvious to everyone, with Brazil coming off their embarrassing Germany 2006 World Cup Quarterfinal exit, that the team is broken.

Who is in charge of whipping this team back into the most feared soccer team on the planet? None other then the hardest man to play Brazilian soccer in the last 15 years—the heavy, hardcore, I just scored a pk versus Italy in the ‘94 World Cup Finals, and I am going to play like I’m putting a sword through Italy’s heart in front of a billion people—Dunga.

Yes, surely he has four other names on his birth certificate, but no one cares about that. His name is Dunga, and his animal spirit is that of a Brahma Bull. I can only dream of Ronaldinho mouthing off to the once-leader of Brazil on the field, and Champion of the World.

I see Dunga being able to impose his fighting spirit and combative perseverance to quell the current attitude that has taken over Brazil—the so called best players on the team believing that they automatically win every game just by showing up.

Even though Dunga has my trust and more importantly the trust of the Brazilian public, that doesn’t mean that everything is a picnic though. Right now, Brazil is looking at a shortage of players. A shortage compared to what Brazil is used to. Today is not the day where you can say that they could field three full world class teams. Right now, they are struggling to field one.

This is actually Dunga’s first documented coaching experience. I say documented because Dunga has been coaching the boys from the field for years. It is easier to coach from the field—you see exactly what is going on. So decisions on the sidelines will be a bit of a change.

As for the job of managing characters and personalities there is only one way that Dunga will play it. “Get thee behind me, weak minds! Show boat beyond what helps the team and you will lose your spot!” Dunga will cast the ego demons from Ronaldinho’s mind either by exorcism, or by straight jabs.

The International Friendly against Norway, Dunga’s Debut, is a simple tune up where they could have won, but the tie maintains respect. Good luck, Dunga! We will see next month when you play Argentina in England—that is where things will start to get interesting.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 19th, 2006 at 3:22 am and is filed under Soccer World, Kamal de Gregory (Soccer Luminary). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.