For those who study tactics, it was interesting to see how Brazil morphed it's team in the FIFA Confederations Cup into a system that best utilized their players. As Jonathan Wilson reports, where they describe themselves in a midfield diamond, it more resembles a 4-2-3-1.At this Confederations Cup, most European observers have happily jotted down their formation as 4-2-3-1, with Luís Fabiano as the centre-forward, Robinho to the left, Kaká as the central creator and Ramires on the right of the attacking three. Gilberto Silva sits in front of the back four, with Fiorentina's Felipe Melo in the slightly more advanced holding role. Yet the Brazilians persist in describing the system as a diamond.
As they see it, Gilberto is the base, with Ramires right and Melo left as carrileros (the shuttlers on the sides of the diamond), Kaká as the playmaking tip, and Robinho as a second striker. At first, that sounds nonsensical, because that isn't how it looks on the pitch, but there is greater subtlety to the Brazilian notation. Gilberto, as the most defensive, they describe as a "first function" midfielder, Melo is "second function" and Ramires, as the most attacking of those three, is "third function".
There is an acceptance too that Robinho pulls left. He does not operate centrally, for were he to do so, he would be competing for space with Kaká and Luís Fabiano. Strangely, he has seemingly reinvented the left-sided attacking position as practised by, for instance, Gianni Riva, in il giocco all'Italiana, the slightly more attacking version of catenaccio practised by Italy in the 1970s. he was, in effect, a converted, tucked-in winger from a 4-3-3, encouraged to move inside by the surges forward of the left-back, who had, since the days of Giacinto Facchetti, been the more attacking of the full-backs in the Italian system.
And once you start to see that, you realise that Ramires, who has had an excellent tournament pounding up and down the right flank, offering deftness as well as energy, could be seen as a modern version of a tornante (literally, a "returner") who, like Jair in Helenio Herrera's Internazionale, is a winger who tracks back. Apart from the fact that the back four is flat rather than employing a sweeper, a middle-aged Italian could easily see this Brazil as an incarnation of il giocco all'Italiana. In that regard, Brazil have become a sort of tactical Rorschach test, with everybody seeing in it what they are culturally disposed to see.
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