If there’s one safe-for-work and non-conspiratorial thing YouTube has taught me, it’s that modern discussions of personal brands and branding might be annoying, but they hold some nuggets of wisdom. Your ‘brand’ isn’t fully in your control, it’s what other people say about you. Or, to extend the metaphor to the scale of nations, national stereotypes aren’t what the English say about the English, they’re what the French say about the English or the Dutch say about the English or, even, what a Swedish football manager says about the English in the way he sets them up for a World Cup quarter-final.

A 4-4-2 with a big man-little man combination up top is exactly what the English footballing stereotype is and it’s exactly how Sven-Göran Eriksson had England play. But national stereotypes of the outside world also paint Brazil as the team of samba, of tricks, of smiles, of bikinis and parades. They might be these off the pitch, but in the big matches on the way to winning the 2002 World Cup Luiz Felipe Scolari’s side wasn’t far off playing a 7-0-3.

Ok, noting it that way might be a little provocative – the seven weren’t a single line, but rather a mass of players – but with Gilberto Silva and Kléberson in central midfield, and Cafu and Roberto Carlos more reserved than one might imagine them, the attacking burden really did lie almost exclusively with the three Rs of Ronaldo, Rivaldo, and Ronaldinho.

As one might expect from an English stereotype, the team sat pretty deep out of possession, at least in modern standards, very quickly settling into a deep-to-mid block. This wasn’t necessarily footballing conservatism, because with Brazil’s back three/back five it would’ve been very difficult to press them well. And if you throw players forward to press, that’d leave fewer players back marking Ron, Riv, and Ronny.

Even so, England’s wingers – David Beckham on the right and Trevor Sinclair on the left – were only too excited to drop off to a deep defensive position. Take this example from a moment in Brazil build-up in the first half – there are three main things to note: the general formations of the two teams, the distance between England’s wingers and Brazil’s wing-backs, and the rotation of Brazil’s forward three.

On formations, England are a deep 4-4-1-1, with spearhead Michael Owen eventually going to press the man on the ball. Brazil for their part have a clear back five, while Kléberson has moved forwards from central midfield slightly. Beckham and Sinclair are sitting well off Brazil’s full/wing-backs, who are way deeper than you’d expect them to be. In modern times, they’d be pushed right up.

As it happened, this situation was only moments before the opening goal of the game for England, and it highlighted the amount of space there was in midfield. Danny Mills at right-back had just received the ball from Paul Scholes, who escaped some counter-pressing after Brazil lost possession just inside the final third…

It might be a little unfair to judge these teams by 2020 standards, however… This kind of breakdown in team structure just 23 minutes into a match, even a World Cup, is something.

Let’s grant Brazil two things though: it’s Danny Mills on the ball, so the apparent level of danger isn’t hugely high, and it took a terrible touch from Lúcio later in the move for an opportunity to actually emerge.

Mills slipped a pass through to Emile Heskey [below] who then played an oddly speculative chipped pass towards Michael Owen, and were it not for Lúcio’s bungled first touch/backpass/leg sneeze the move would have ended there.

Given that he, in a fashion, got an assist for England’s only goal in the quarter-final, Heskey really deserves a word. The Three Lions were surprisingly tame during the match, but the then-Liverpool forward was key to them staying active with some superb hold-up play. And let’s not do down hold-up play. In a game where passing and first touch were a little sloppy, Heskey’s touch was consistently good and his movement meant that he was open enough to be found by his teammates.

Despite uninspiring play – largely because the match as a whole was pretty scrappy – England’s lead lasted until right before half-time where, the one time that Brazil managed to get a break and Ronaldinho got a chance to stretch his legs, they scored.

Ronaldinho’s dribbling, Rivaldo’s finishing, 1-1. And that moment said so much in so few seconds: the talent, and gamesmanship, of Brazil’s forwards made it difficult for England to defend. It takes many men to pull down a statue and the Brazilian stars were statuesque in their skilful magnificence. Time and time again it took an extra English player – or two! – to halt one of Brazil’s three Rs.

This would, shortly after the start of the second half, become even more important. Just a few minutes after half-time Ronaldinho surprised David Seaman and the entire viewing public by shooting from a position nobody should really be shooting from.

Rivaldo said recently that Ronaldinho had noticed the English goalkeeper had a tendency of creeping forward at set-pieces, and that’s what he did here, taking two steps forward after the kick had been taken before realising the trajectory of the ball was far from what he’d been expecting.

Brazil were now 2-1 up but the balance of the match had been pretty even. It had been a scrappy game since the start, really, with Brazil apparently taking inspiration from the English stereotype and engaging in the fine art of ‘leaving the boot in’.

Their commitment to the art looked to come back to bite them just before the hour-mark though, as Ronaldinho – the 22-year-old exciting new star of this Brazil team, the man who’d just ingeniously put them ahead – was given a straight red.

The decision was called harsh at the time and it still looks harsh now. The ball was loose between Danny Mills and the Brazil forward, and both went for it. While Mills went low on the ball, Ronaldinho’s foot was higher, connecting with the ball just above and left of centre. As it ricocheted away, Ronaldinho’s leg kept going, though not, seemingly, with much real pace, but the ‘leave the boot in’ mantra meant he kept his leg straight rather than pulling away.

His studs hit Mills’ ankle, and the momentum of Mills – who’d had further to travel to get to the ball than the Brazilian – and angle of his body sent him spinning around onto the floor. As the red card was raised, Ronaldinho looked as disbelieving as the English fans had seven minutes earlier when David Seaman had been sent scrambling in his failed attempt to stop the ball flying mockingly over his head into the top corner.

Falling 2-1 down to this Brazil side is nothing to be too ashamed of; it’s England’s response in this last half-hour of the match that is the true embarrassment.

Brazil, leading, essentially just left their line-up as it was, sans Ronaldinho. Their central defenders were a little more tactically interesting than before, with one of the two wider ones stepping forward at times into a defensive midfield zone but not staying there permanently.

It’s a mark of how well Emile Heskey was playing – at least, in comparison with the rest of his teammates – that this centre-back movement seemed to be pretty closely tied to stopping him getting the ball. Despite Michael Owen, David Beckham, and Paul Scholes being on the pitch, it was Heskey that was the true sun that (rare) attacks orbited around.

On 70 minutes, Ronaldo was substituted for Edílson. Brazil’s forward pairing now had a combined age of 61, and they still managed to give England’s back-line a runaround, in and out of possession. That the English couldn’t escape their pressing with ease, and couldn’t get the ball off them (although gamesmanship was a part of this second one), is a failure.

Worse, perhaps, was the English unimaginative confusion in attack. Take the below: Scholes has just escaped some pressure to play the ball to Mills. Look where Mills and Beckham, the greatest crosser in the world, are in relation to each other.

With Kieron Dyer, the substitute winger on the other side, also tucked in, it looks like Eriksson’s plan for England was to have them cross the ball in. The fact that this looked like the plan, while not even trying to manufacture ways for Beckham to be the one delivering all of these passes, is unfathomable.

But it gets worse.

With just under fifteen minutes to go, England took off Michael Owen and Ashley Cole for Darius Vassell and Teddy Sheringham, shifting to a 3-4-3, with Dyer on the left still drifting into the box as well.

Now I’m not exactly a Moyesian proponent of crossing at any opportunity, but England regularly had four bodies inside the box and from there were fewer crosses on show than around an atheist’s neck. Their shy approach to chucking it in the mixer was doubly painful, because their poor ball circulation and fact they had so many players forward meant that they were vulnerable to breaks. Brazil, a man down and a goal up, never really sought to score off these counters, but they found it extremely easy to gain ground and evade challenges.

Brazil ground out the victory, true to their performances in the tournament if not their national footballing stereotype. England, along with 4-4-2s and big man-little man combos, added ‘failure to have a plan’ to theirs.