June 4th and I'm going back 26 years to 1995 and the meeting between Sweden and Brazil at Villa Park, Birmingham as part of the warm up for the organisers of the following summer's Euro96 tournament to be held in England.
I love watching International football and the chance to watch a fixture that you'd never normally get to see is not one to be passed up. This game formed part of the "Umbro Cup", a four team round robin tournament involving Brazil, England, Japan and Sweden. There were six games in total and I managed to attend the lot. In the opening game held the day before this one England had beaten Japan 2-1 at Wembley.
Brazil are many people's second favourite international side after their own country. Personally I find it nauseating that there are quite so many people in the world who are desperate to associate themselves with success. People who are hopeful that they can bask in a bit of reflected glory. People who want you to say "Look at him! He supports Brazil!" or some such. It's for the same reason that so many people around the world support Manchester United. Conspicuous consumption akin to owning a designer label. For all these reasons I therefore tend to enjoy it when Brazil fail and the yellow shirts quietly disappear back into drawers for another four years.
Sweden have no such problems. If you support Sweden you're almost certainly Swedish. Swedish football in 1995 was at something of a high water mark. At the USA World Cup in 1994, Sweden had made it all the way to the Semi-Final where there was no shame in being eliminated 1-0 by Brazil who were on their way to winning another World Cup. This meeting was the first meeting of the two since then. Arguably we were watching two of the world's best four footballing nations.
Brazil had appointed new manager Mario Zagallo following their World Cup win under Carlos Alberto Parreira. Zagallo holds the record for winning the World Cup having won it four times: Twice as a player (1958 and 1962) and twice more as a manager/assistant manager (1970 and 1994). He is one of only three people to have won the World Cup as both player and manager along with Franz Beckenbauer and Didier Deschamps.
The Brazil side that day included Aldair, Roberto Carlos, Dunga, Edmundo and a nineteen year old PSV Eindhoven player called Ronaldo (full name: Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima) who went on become a world superstar and to play 98 times for Brazil scoring 62 goals. There were only 20,131 at Villa Park that day. What an opportunity the absentees missed!
Sweden's team contained six of the side that had lost to Brazil in that World Cup Semi-Final (Bjorklund, Lyung, Mild, Thern, Dahlin and Kennet Andersson. The young programme cover star Henrik Larsson (pictured alongside Brazil's Leonardo) hadn't appeared in the Semi-Final but he would go on to become one of Sweden's most famous ever players earning 106 caps and scoring 37 times for his country.
Brazil, wearing unfamiliar blue shirts (Sweden wear yellow too and must have won the toss for the right to wear their home shirt), won the game 1-0 with a goal from Flamengo's Edmundo, nicknamed Animal in Italy, who scored at the North Stand end. The Brazilian commentator (on the video clip attached to my blog) crowed the word that must surely be a contractual obligation required of all Brazilian commentators: "Goooooooooooooollllllllll!!!!!". And it was.
CRB Match No. 973
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