by Stuart Crowther

Date: 6th June 2002

Rivaldo damages the Brazilian myth Once respected football kings are human after all IT WOULD SEEM THAT BRAZILIAN footballers are human after all.  In common with professionals around the world, the mighty men from South America, who for generations have been regarded as the supermen of world football, are not averse to a bit of cheating now and again.  'Professionalism' they might call it, 'Cunning' is what Rivaldo calls it, but regardless if it is in the World Cup finals by the greatest players on the planet, or wee Shug taking a dive in the penalty box on an Edinburgh playing field, it's cheating. The World Cup finals are the greatest football spectacle on the planet.  The eyes of the world are on our sport, and the sport will benefit from that exposure, it filters right down through the game in every nation and fires up the enthusiasm for the somewhat less salubrious domestic championships ahead.  Like small boys learning from their heroes, our own players in the SPL tend to take a lead from what they see in these finals.  Most of what they take is good, most of what they try to emulate is impossible simply through a lack of required natural talent!  They will also see a lot of cheating going on, they will see every trick in the book being employed to fool the hapless referee and his 'assistants' (and why by the way do they call them that when they appear to do so little 'assisting'?). Ecuador finished above Brazil in qualifying - perhaps that's why the mighty Brazilians now feel a need to cheat? The sad thing about this comes when the cheating is being perpetrated so openly by a player who simply should not need to resort to such folly.  Rivaldo has not tainted football through his actions, after all we know what he is guilty off and we know it happens every week at every stadium where the game is played.  No, Rivaldo's crime is much worse than that, he has tainted that wonderful vision we all have of Brazilian football, what we have always been brought up to believe is the purest of them all.  Sadder still is the fact that Rivaldo offers neither excuse nor apology for his actions, when he threw himself to the ground clutching head after a ball was thrown at a point some considerable distance south!  "Football is a game and people have to be cunning, people have forgotten about the 90 previous minutes - about what I did in the game, what the Brazilian team did in the game," he said after picking up a £4,500 fine for his actions. Exactly Mr Rivaldo, for the wrong reasons you have seen exactly what such acts will do.  Brazil did indeed play some wonderful football against a hard-fighting Turkish side who perhaps lacked the skills but scared the hell out of the South Americans with pure grit, and most of it within the rules of the game.  But in that one act of stupidity, the beautiful game of Brazilian football was tarnished and it will take a hell of a lot more than Brasso to bring the shine back again.  "This isn’t going to be the only one of these incidents that are going to happen, and let’s see if the next ones get punished," the Brazilian genius (and cheat) added.  Sadly in that he has a point, and the hope is that having acted swiftly FIFA remain willing to do exactly the same again, and again - indeed for as long as it takes to wipe this sort of thing from the game. And of course if FIFA are prepared to act in such a high-profile manner, then can we expect the SFA to do likewise next season?  We'll take that as a maybe!