A Brazilian Team secured its first place ranking in the Group B of the Copa America with a round in advance by beating Colombia 2-1 at the Nilton Santos stadium, in a comeback. Despite the positive result, coach Tite took advantage of his post-match press conference to criticize the pitch, what had already mentioned other times, to the “pecked game” imposed by the opponents and also to the arbitration of the Argentine Nestor Pitana.
The harshest words were about the state of the camp: “I won’t say horrible [condições], but too bad to play soccer. That detract from the whole spectacle. Whoever wants to create cannot. It was very quick time to do this [deixar o gramado em condições] and it’s not very fast to do. It is inadmissible for athletes from two teams to play in Europe with such a good quality of turf and with a better spectacle to have to play on a field with these conditions. The ball is chopped up, nervous, the fluency of the plays is all impaired.”
The decision to move the Copa América to Brazil was taken less than two weeks before the opening game because of Argentina and Colombia’s withdrawals. Therefore, the playing fields were chosen within a restricted universe of options.
But the criticism didn’t stop there. Although without going into details, the Brazilian national team coach condemned refereeing in a question about so much emotion helping to give his team the shell: “This game is not the characteristic of the tradition of Brazil x Colombia. All the other games were competitive, but they had more game. All the other games were like that. [casca], yes, because you play pressed. And playing under pressure is difficult, in a while you want to set the pace and you can’t. We ran a risk of playing nervous and upset. And I will say: I would not like to speak. Pitana has to take care… He has to take care… He has to take care… He has to take care….
Tite himself had a hot-blooded moment towards the final minutes, when he fell out with an assistant from Reinaldo Rueda’s technical committee: “We compete fairly to get the result, to get volume, entering players, and when we celebrate, We celebrated together. Without confronting and facing the opponent. With the exception of me, there was a professional from there in a red shirt that I didn’t know who he was, he spoke my name, and I said that I didn’t speak with him, I spoke with Rueda. I pointed and said I wouldn’t admit it.”
Finally, Colombia’s game strategy after opening the scoreboard nine minutes into the first half was also the subject of comments by Tite, who sees lessons from this comeback with goals in the 32nd and 54th minutes of the second half.
“When the team leaves behind at the beginning of the game, it has to build, organize, speed up, find submissions and propose a game against a team that has quality also on the other side and wanted to keep chopping the game, not bringing normal game sequence. [Colômbia] I didn’t want a game, I didn’t want to set the pace and we needed to pace. Concentration is mainly the athlete’s merit. They haven’t come in cold. This plus of substitutions with a high concentration level makes our victory extremely important.”
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