Brazil in 1970, wrote the great Uruguayan essayist and epigrammist Eduardo Galeano, “played a soccer worthy of her people’s yearning for celebration and craving for beauty”. It has become commonplace to argue ever since their grisly campaign to defend the World Cup in 1974 that the subsequent five decades have been spent in a kind of aesthetic wilderness, betraying the credo and paradigm of ‘the beautiful game’ in grim pursuit of defensive robustness to counterbalance the seemingly ad-lib attacking ingenuity. A fear of being overrun by unyielding, ruthless opponents should Brazil return to first principles as they did under Tele Santana in 1982, the hypothesis goes, has reduced them to sacrificing the poetic for the prosaic.

System, structure, discipline and world-class strikers earned a fourth and fifth World Cup. We would all feel blessed to be thus compromised. But by 2014, this muddle took them on a foul-strewn run to the semi-final where, without the injured Neymar, they suffered their utmost humiliation in the 7-1 thrashing by Germany. The way the nation treated Neymar’s absence in the build-up, gnashing their teeth as if he had been martyred instead of injured, emphasised the extent of the problem. Those laments were a siren and the autopsy dwelt on the philosophical and psychological inadequacies that disgraced the team’s heritage.