Argentina, Brazil set to face off in fascinating battle
Gerardo Martino is under pressure. Dunga is under pressure. Argentina and Brazil are both under pressure. The Pacific half of Conmebol, the South American confederation, is rising, and the result is that both Argentina and Brazil suddenly find themselves in a battle to qualify for the 2018 World Cup. When they meet on Thursday at el Monumental in Buenos Aires, it's likely to be grim, nervous and fascinating.
Both sides have found qualifying a battle in the past. Before the 2010 tournament, Diego Maradona's side squeaked through with late goals that brought wins over Peru and Uruguay in the final two qualifiers. Before 2002, Luiz Felipe Scolari's Brazil lost six of 18 games in scraping through - and then went on to win the tournament. This, though, feels different.
The landscape has changed. Chile is the Copa America champion for the first time; a tough, well-drilled side that has lost its sense of inferiority. Even with Radamel Falcao in decline, this is as good a Colombia side as there has been in two decades.
The structure Conmebol introduced for qualifying before the 1998 World Cup, whereby everybody plays everybody else home and away, has had the desired effect: with regular games against the elite, the traditional minnows have enjoyed greater revenues and exposure than ever before and the result has been a raising of standards across the board. What that means, though, is that the two traditional superpowers can no longer take their qualification for granted.
Argentina still seems to be suffering the hangover from its defeat on penalties to Chile in the Copa America final. It lost 2-0 at home to Ecuador in its opening qualifier and a goalless draw away to Paraguay did little to lift the mood. Even worse, it goes into the game against Brazil without an entire forward line or two key defenders, with Lionel Messi, Sergio Aguero, Carlos Tevez, Pablo Zabaleta and Ezequiel Garay all injured.
There has been a clamor for the young forwards Angel Correa and Paulo Dybala to be given their chance but, conservative that Martino is, it seems likely his front three will be Ezequiel Lavezzi, Gonzalo Higuain and Angel Di Maria. Higuain is perhaps the surprise after the major chances he missed in both the World Cup and Copa America finals (before missing his penalty in the shoot-out), but he has rediscovered his form at Napoli this season, scoring nine times in twelve league appearances.
Brazil is hardly in a better shape. A Willian-inspired victory over Venezuela means it has two more points than Argentina, but it lost its opening qualifier away to Chile - only its eighth defeat in 71 meetings - and it does at least have Neymar, in scintillating form for Barcelona and back from the four-game suspension he received for his red card and subsequent verbal attack on the referee in the 1-0 defeat to Colombia during the Copa America.
The underlying reasons for Neymar's petulance that night in Santiago, though, have not been addressed. It felt then as though his actions were those of a man overwhelmed by the expectation that had been placed in him in a Brazil team that essentially featured 10 players supporting one star. For a national team of Brazil's stature, that felt a strangely regressive way to play, the enthralment to the cult of one individual rendering it sluggish and predictable.
That was true during the World Cup, when Brazil was cynical and heavily reliant on tactical, and it remains true now. The crushing 7-1 defeat to Germany in the semi-final might elsewhere have brought a revolution, a recognition that the structures currently in place have led to a generation of hard grafters lacking the sense of magic that once enchanted the world - that, weirdly, Brazil and Germany seemed almost to have swapped stereotype - but although Luiz Felipe Scolari was removed as coach, his replacement was the very opposite of a new broom - Dunga, the man whose rugged caution had led to such a disappointing showing at the 2010 World Cup.
Brazil at the Copa America was no different to Brazil at the World Cup, and little has changed since. This is less an attempt at reform than a circling of the wagons, symbolized most obviously by Dunga's decision to select the 33-year-old Kaka over Philippe Coutinho, who hasn't even made the squad, seemingly on the logic that Kaka was the key figure last time Brazil played in a World Cup qualifier away to Argentina.
That, though, was six years ago. The world moves on, but Brazilian football seems stuck in an unhelpful time-warp. And yet such are Argentina's problems, it may yet prevail in this battle of the struggling giants.
