Of all the qualities Tite has displayed since he became the coach of Brazil, diplomacy has often been to the fore. After his appointment he insisted it was he who must adapt his style to the players and not the other way around. More recently he expressed sympathy for the pain he caused those players who missed the World Cup. After arriving in Russia, he spoke of the expectation his team were under and warned: “We can’t always control the result.”

Tite was wise to be circumspect. The man who, just last week, was swatting away questions on how it felt to be universally liked in his football crazy country no longer has to worry about that. A frustrating draw against Switzerland on Sunday evening has cracked Group E open. With an impressive Serbia still to come, Brazil must beat Costa Rica in St Petersburg on Friday. But that is not their only problem. You might argue it is not even their most important.

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First in the queue for attention, as ever, is Neymar. The blond forward has been the subject of his own little soap opera this week after limping away from team training on Tuesday. This, the Brazilian FA said, was an injury unrelated to the broken metatarsal that kept him out of the Paris Saint-Germain side for three months and limited his World Cup preparation. It was, it said, a sore ankle, the result of being persistently hacked at by the Swiss (Neymar drew 10 fouls against him on Sunday, the most in any World Cup game since Alan Shearer against Tunisia in 1998).

In his pre-match press conference, Tite chose not to grind that particular axe. He confirmed that Neymar would play against Costa Rica in an unchanged side. He also insisted he was not taking a risk with the team’s talisman. Asked whether Neymar would be playing were the match not so important, Tite said: “Yes, yes. He would be playing. It’s not a sacrifice. We want to win, it’s a World Cup, but the coach is not going to risk a player’s health by being dishonest to him. That’s a price that’s too high to pay. Those values of health and honesty, no way, there’s no compromise.”

It was an assertive, some might say dramatic, response and Tite adopted a similar tone when addressing the other issue dogging Neymar this week, his performance. Alongside the fouls, Neymar generated another striking statistic in the Switzerland game as he surrendered possession a total of seven times. Brazil’s play was consistently funnelled to his feet but often came to an end there. Reports after the match had suggested Tite pulled Neymar aside and instructed him to play more for the team. This claim has been vociferously denied by the coach.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Neymar will start against Costa Rica despite a minor injury scare this week. Photograph: Henry Romero/Reuters

“Absolutely not. The information you got is not true, it’s not true. It didn’t happen,” he said, but he also used the moment to reiterate the importance of team play. “All the players have the responsibility of playing for the collective and also being individuals, some with some specific characteristics.

“Neymar, I’m not going to take away from him this initiative in the last third of the pitch. He’s a genius. You have my word, this is not true. We all have to work as a team, but we have to respect the characteristics. In the last third of the pitch, you have to create possibilities for the finish. I’m not going to take that away from anybody.”

A player whose status sometimes threatens to eclipse that of the entire team (as it does with his club side), is not Brazil’s only problem, however. The Brazilian FA made an official complaint to Fifa after the Switzerland match over the failure of VAR to review certain decisions, including the buildup to the Swiss equaliser.

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On Wednesday it conceded this complaint had been rejected. The squad have also been having to adjust to the white nights of St Petersburg, where the sun never truly sets. Thiago Silva, who will be captain against Costa Rica as part of the coach’s policy of rotating the job, spoke of the measures the squad have had to take to get some sleep. “Yesterday we stayed up a little late, having some physiotherapy at 1.30 in the morning,” Silva said. “[We were told] to turn off our cell phones, so that we could sleep.”

Drama is never too far away from any Brazil side, of course, and any anxieties would be calmed substantially with three points on Friday. But the noises coming from within the camp this week do not sound like a team entirely at ease with themselves and the same could also be said of their performance against the Swiss. Four years on from the Mineirazo, the talk before this World Cup was of a squad determined to put behind them the national humiliation of the loss to Germany. It was always a challenge to imagine those deep wounds had healed entirely, but they may be closer to the surface than we thought.