Newcastle’s pass master embodies everything that Andy Harper has adored in Brazilian football since an eye-opening visit in 2000, the Network 10 analyst writes for KEEPUP.
November 13, 2021. Newcastle Jets play Western United in the play-off for a place in the FFA Cup. A Brazilian recruit takes the field for the Jets.
His promptings are tidy with a predilection for his left foot, which makes sweet contact with the ball. Moves that oscillate from the stealthy to the slick. Arthur Papas might have something here. I’m prompted to take notes that his rival coaches may need to pay attention.
There’s 62 minutes on the clock. The Jets, hamstrung by a wrong goal-line decision, are seeking retribution. Daniel Penha fires a rocket from a long-range free-kick; its trajectory, despite the distance, is too much for Jamie Young in the Western goal. My match notes are now punctuated by an exclamation mark! I get a tad giddy at the portents.
I start thinking about where Penha might fit in the lengthy list of Brazilians who have spanned both the NSL and the A-League Men.
Agenor Muniz, a Vasco da Gama product, actually came to also be a Socceroo in the 1970s. Fernando Rech of Brisbane “Parmalat” Strikers (NSL) and Adelaide United (A-League) remains truly one of my favourites. Fred was a dominant force for Melbourne Victory under Ernie Merrick. And the all-star cast was led by O Rei do Rio (the King of Rio) Romario (Adelaide United), Juninho Paulista (at Sydney FC) and Europe’s most feared striker of his time, Mario Jardel (Newcastle Jets) – although, regrettably, his Australian spell bore no resemblance to his FC Porto exploits. He remained, thankfully, charmingly Brazilian at least.
Rifling through my Brazilian back catalogue, these first impressions of Penha promised plenty. There was the Meerkat-like scanning and alertness. His calling card, a lethally swift strike from that left foot, Zoro like, so incisive and clean that the recipient barely feels the wound but is left wondering from where the blood is spurting. And his elan, engaged with a gear box that has booster potential, as he skips past attendant challengers. He treats space like the Carnivale parade; he nips in and out of the cluster, at once both camouflaged and obviously glittering.
Brazil’s next postcard to Australian football had been presented, in a Jets shirt, on the apron of the upcoming season’s stage, and the anticipation was keen.
For those predisposed to wonder; what is it about Brazil that is so intoxicating? From the singular perspective of this white, Anglo-male, with an Aussie childhood of cultural rigidity, it’s the exuberance, flamboyance, passion and expressiveness. It is the connection to things that flowed, seemingly, from a variant life force. Markedly less self-conscious, it is the unashamed adulation of beauty. A lively embrace of the aesthetic. A celebration of, and contest with, life’s rhythm and soul. A well-spring of creativity that comes forth in art, music, literature, and futebol.
This dissonance hit me, like a sledgehammer, on my first sojourn to Rio de Janeiro, a quick visit that followed Australia’s World Cup qualifier against Uruguay in 2001. Remember that? Kevin Muscat’s penalty at the MCG enabled Australia to pack a one-goal advantage into its swag for the return-leg in Montevideo. What a city too, by the way. And what a life-changing game that was.
The Socceroos were humbled by La Celeste 3-1 (aggregate). Our great team suffocated out of any real chance of turning the turgid history of World Cup failure by Alvaro Recoba and Co and a skin-pressing atmosphere in the Estadio Centenario. Socceroo Tony Vidmar left the ground inconsolable. In the upper reaches of the stadium, I was equally bereft. Shattered. This, very probably, was the catalyst for my Damascene Latin experience. A broken soul in need of solace.
Johnny Warren had sensed the educational opportunity that awaited a small number of his “unwashed” colleagues. So, a week in Rio was planned, post Montevideo. Dejected, we flew to O Cidade Marvilhosa, the marvellous city.
Rio was Johnny’s place of respite. He’d been visiting it for years. Presumably, it represented for him a similar awakening, compared with the formative period of his youth in 1950s south Sydney. The best way he could describe Brazil was to take us there, to Rio. And that’s when it hit, the sledgehammer. Almost immediately. Shattering the china-laiden shelving of my world.
We stayed in Ipanema and spent the days beachside. People everywhere. Beating sun, cloying humidity, the bodies semi-clad (or barely clad). We were quite the spectacle, Aussies in board shorts on the beach, looking prudish by comparison. Beach vendors, trudging kilometres from Copacabana through Ipanema and up to Leblon, selling pretty much everything from bikinis to bbq’d haloumi and prawns, and then back again.
The seething mass of oil-drenched sunbakers were flanked by the surging Atlantic Ocean and the lineup of courts, where beach volleyball and futevolei provided free, highly competitive entertainment. In the shallows of the low tide, groups in circles played keep-up with frustrating agility, touch, flexibility and consistency. And, this given Sunday, with the beach packed, a spontaneous and volcanic roar erupted, with most of the mass of prone bodies elevating as one, like a breakdancer doing the worm.
We wondered if, quite literally, a bomb had gone off. But it was something more dramatic than that. Flamengo had just scored at the Maracana and on this late-season December day, probably avoiding relegation as a result; the transistor radios breaking the news … “Goooaaallllllll, G G G G Goallllll Flaaamengoooo”. And then the party started.
Other days we checked out the sights. We took in a tour of the Maracana, which was highlighted by a remarkable role-play reenactment of the 1950 World Cup Final, played on this hallowed turf, where Brazil lost the unlosable game against Uruguay. Up until Brazil were humiliated 7-1 by Germany in the 2014 World Cup semifinal in Belo Horizonte, this was the Selecao’s darkest day. Fifty years later, the pain and suffering were still visceral. I was still pouting after Uruguay had done us over, and although that was only a matter of days rather than decades previous, I think I empathised with this expression of grief.
Daily, Johnny would insist that we meet for lunch at the bar, Garota de Ipanema, so named after the famous song The Girl From Ipanema. He called it “the office”; it was where he’d hold court. An endless offering of singers, magicians, freestyle footballers, beggars, acrobats, dance troupes. Johnny would indulge them all. And samba! O the samba. The Brazil that passed us by, in all its shades and sounds, provided a canvass for Johnny that he alone could not create. By osmosis, Brazil shattered the veneer and permeated the consciousness.
From that point on, for me, a new relationship with Brazil’s football was born. As a kid I’d marvelled, through television, at the Brazil teams through the 80’s and 90’s. I now had real time, if incomplete, scaffolding to interpret the wonder. This trip was my window to the larger Latin football world.
Costa Rica’s Victory maestro Carlos Hernandez personified it. Newcastle’s Venezuelan Ronnie Vargas had that glint and glide. There have been others. Latin Aussie Anthony Caceres is of the hue, as was Nick Carle before him.
From my vantage point, the glaring difference is the very obvious, and very intimate, relationship with the ball. This is not at the expense of team mechanics, or tactics, or the desperation to win. Brazil’s football can be, is, as cynical as anywhere, its domestic league one of the more brutal going around. I guess these go some way to highlighting even more the essence of beauty at the core of Latino, Brazilian, football. The fans want to win. They want to brag. They want to dominate. But they want their players to deliver that moment of beauty.
It is truly symbolic of their wider experience, having emerged from the military dictatorship to a society with problematic violent crime, that rates too highly on the corruption index and boasts one of the great wealth disparities on the planet… amidst this mayhem Brazil can, must, deliver escape into the beautiful, ethereal world of creativity.
It is these moments that unify and is it these moments that embody the essence of the DNA. Beauty for beauty’s sake. And with the ball at the centre of that universe, the fascination of Brazilian football is how the art interweaves with the brutality (of survival, of the need to win). And Penha has provided this. Attached to that ball, his left foot can launch, long and accurately, a scything attack in the same way that an artist will start a masterpiece with that first, long stroke of the brush. And he will teleport, it seems, to the creation’s finishing touches, as he threads a final, silky pass, to goal (currently he leads the league in assists) or finishes it himself.
That song, Garota de Ipanema (The Girl from Ipanema) became Johnny’s ring tone. Serendipitously, it was the first song I heard on the radio when we got back to Australia. Originally, obviously, penned in Portuguese, the opening lines read:
Olha que coisa mais linda mais cheia de graça
É ela menina que vem que passa
(In translation: Look what a beautiful thing, more full of grace, She is the girl who comes and goes …)
Be transported with me to Johnny Warren’s Ipanema beachside office, and that’s watching Daniel Penha, walking by. Look at that beautiful player, full of grace, he is the guy who comes and goes. Alternatively, you may relate more directly to the rather more succinct words of my adolescent son who, whilst watching the Jets game with me on the couch last Sunday, proclaimed “Daniel Penha gets me out of my seat.” At the very least, he makes me smile whilst swinging with grace and dressed in gold.
Penha and the Jets are next in action against Melbourne Victory at McDonald Jones Stadium on Saturday, April 16, as their tilt for a spot in the finals continues.
