Cover of the book “In the Shadow of the Immortal Boots” by Nelson Rodrigues
Today, readers approach newspaper sports reports with an excess of images on their retinas. It's likely they were watching the game on a screen; that once finished, they have reviewed the most important pieces; Social networks may have even provided select details and curiosities for the audience. So the chronicler has only one option left to attract the distracted attention of the public. Of course, it is a personal and non-transferable option available only to you: your point of view. The good expert will offer an idea – one of those that rarely exists – on which the entire text will focus. An idea accompanied by arguments and memory so that they offer the reader an understandable plan of the situation. This allows the audience to enjoy some events they have already experienced in a different way. He will do it through the eyes and thoughts of another person.
The Brazilian Nelson Rodrigues was a journalist and writer. He talked about his team's victory at the World Cup in 1958, 1962 and 1970. Also about the Maracanazo of 1950 – “the setback was not suffered by eleven individuals, but by the failure of the Brazilian.” In the shadow of the immortal football boots (days counted) Rodrigues collects football chronicles from the period 1955 to 1970. The edition contains interesting forewords that help to understand the character of the writer and the strength of the Brazilian team of that time, which is forever anchored in the sentimental memory of football fans. These forewords are signed by Simon Kuper, Sergi Pàmies, Alfredo Relaño, Jorge Valdano, Enrique Vila-Matas, Juan Villoro and José Miguel Wisnik.
Rodrigues' chronicles are very amateurish. They are excessive in victory and defeat – cyclothymic, just like the stands – they are full of adjectives, theses of the time, passion and nostalgia for the football of yesterday, when there was hardly any football back then. It presented the idols in an original way. He fomented with finesse what he called the “elegant people.” He dissected the soul of his country through football. Contrary to correctness and very socially critical, he had a certain penchant for provocation through ironic praise of corrupt referees, the glorification of bad words as inseparable from the game or statements like “The Brazilian doesn't like Brazilians”. As a Fluminense fan, he even summoned the dead to important games – “death does not release anyone from their duties towards their club.” He also left a prophetic sentence for the time when the term “yesterday” is already easily applied in football could: “Woe to a club that does not cultivate its nostalgia.”
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