Sócrates: uma homenagem

Sócrates, Brazil's painter on the pitch who was denied world glory

With his languid grace, Brazil's midfield genius was a joy to behold, but he was much more than just a footballer

Richard Williams
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 4 December 2011 18.03 GMT

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/dec/04/socrates-brazil-football


News of the death of Sócrates, the sublimely elegant midfield player, who succumbed on Sunday at the age of 57 to complications following treatment for food poisoning in a São Paulo hospital, evokes memories of a day in Barcelona in 1982 when, with a single stroke of his boot, he seemed to have eased Brazil towards another World Cup final.

Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira had almost enough names for an entire football team, and as much talent as most teams put together. No footballer, not even Diego Maradona or Eric Cantona, cut a more identifiable figure than the tall, handsome, bearded, wonderfully languid figure who was one of the few Brazilians of his era to rise from the middle classes to the national side and who gave commentators a chance to point out that he was a qualified doctor.

Few players have ever moved around the pitch with such a frictionless, understated grace. Three inches over 6ft, long-legged and skinny in his prime, Sócrates nudged the ball and stroked it and, above all, backheeled it until the geometry of the game had arranged itself to his satisfaction.

But his effort was not enough to take Brazil all the way in that sunlit summer of 1982. The shot that beat Dino Zoff at his near post in the 12th minute equalised an early opening goal from Paolo Rossi, and appeared to be the prelude to an inevitable victory for the South American forces of light and creativity but it was the Italians who prevailed 3-2 in the Sarrià stadium and went on to the lift the trophy. In Brazil and around the world, millions mourned the departure of the side Sócrates captained and which had seemed to embody so much of his country's unique gift to the game. Along with the 1954 Hungarians, they became known as the best team never to have won the World Cup.

The captain was the fulcrum, the inventor and facilitator, as Gérson, a fellow heavy smoker, had been in the great 1970 team. But whereas Gérson was a craftsman at his lathe, fashioning beauty from solid matter, Sócrates was a painter at his easel, summoning beauty from his imagination.

That 1982 team are remembered for their extraordinary, almost excessive profusion of midfield talent. Alongside Sócrates were the heavenly skills and furious shot of Zico, the sumptuous poise of Paulo Roberto Falcão and the elemental drive of Toninho Cerezo. This being Brazil, there were other decent players in the team, notably Júnior, the dynamic left-back, and Eder, a charismatic second striker, who took the eye as Brazil swept past the Soviet Union (2-1), Scotland (4-1) and New Zealand (4-0) in the opening group phase.

They continued their progress in the second round with a 3-1 win over Maradona's Argentina but then fell to Rossi's hat-trick as their limitations – a poor defence and, in Serginho, a third-rate principal striker – got the better of them. There was no Didi, no Amarildo, no Vavá, no Pelé, and no Nílton Santos, Carlos Alberto or Gilmar to shore up the other end. And there was, perhaps, just a hint of a fatal self-indulgence in their delirious inventiveness.

Pelé, usually a fount of unreliable opinion, was spot on when it came to the 1982 team. "There were some excellent performances," he wrote in his autobiography, "but it seemed the team was all midfield, it wasn't as balanced as the teams I had played in."

Telê Santana, the coach, had to take the blame, although only the harshest of judges would condemn a man who sent out his team with the intention of enjoying themselves and enrapturing the spectators. Santana had arrived after the debacles of 1974 and 1978, when Brazil presented a brand of defensive football so uncharacteristic as to be grotesque. Santana was cherished for attempting to exalt the flair and restore the lustre of the Brazilian game, prioritising a luxuriant athleticism over sheer physical effort, and Sócrates was his general on the pitch.

The son of a father who named two more of his sons, Sófocles and Sóstenes, after famous Greeks from antiquity, Sócrates was a left-wing intellectual who read Plato and Hobbes as well as his namesake and whose idols were Che Guevara and John Lennon. During his time with the Corinthians club in São Paulo he organised the players into a sort of workers' collective, seizing the right to make everyday decisions for themselves. He addressed political rallies and, as Brazil's detested military dictatorship began to crumble, arranged for the team to wear on their shirts a slogan exhorting their fans to vote in the 1982 elections.

Paul Breitner, the left-back of West Germany's 1974 World Cup winning side, was an avowed Marxist, and Maradona is a pal of Fidel Castro. But Sócrates was a man of substance as well as gesture. "He managed to politicise football in Brazil as no one has ever done," Alex Bellos wrote in Futebol, his marvellous survey of the game in Brazil. A man, too, who liked a drink, a smoke and a conversation: a hero to nonconformists and romantics everywhere.