Vai Corinthians!

By: dylan | September 4th, 2008

Corinthians flag The world’s greatest team, and the world’s greatest fans, finally have a space on the world’s greatest football blog… Welcome to The Offside Corinthians!

As far as I know, this is the first-ever Corinthians blog in English. Hopefully I can do justice to the fine blogs from Brazil, like Edson & Co. over at Blog do Timão and Débora Miranda at Globoesporte.

Over time, I’m going to write posts about the history, politics, and passion of o Timão, but for now let’s get right to business:

Corinthians 4 x 0 ABC

‘Cos you can’t argue with success. (Highlights below the jump.)

Yes, on Saturday Corinthians continued to play champagne football (well, “champagne” for the Brazilian second division — maybe Champale football?). We put four past ABC, who flew some 1,800 miles for the privilege. Check out the goals (the third is a true work of art):

(Globo’s full highlights reel is here, although it leaves out the first two goals.)

Gorgeous, gorgeous stuff. In this game and the 5-0 whipping we gave Gama last week, the team rediscovered the rampant, attacking style that we had back in May/June.

What happened? Well, I’ll admit we’ve been playing crap teams. No getting around that. But América-RN and CRB are even worse, and we struggled to beat them. Something changed in the last two weeks. Roger at BT thinks Gama’s green kit might have gotten the lads’ blood flowing.

Whatever the reason, the midfield has woken up. We’re almost playing a kind of total football, with a swarm of attacking players who can drop back or surge forward as needed. The heart of it is Elias, Douglas, and Morais, who feed each other sugar-coated passes in limitless combinations.

Add in our two fullbacks, plus Herrera, who missed some truly embarrassing chances but made up for it with two pretty assists. Hell, even Lulinha won us a penalty. The numbers are impressive: nine goals in two games, from six different players. And only two of those goals were from strikers.

Of course, this is exactly the kind of enthusiasm that Mano always warns against. And he’s right, there’s no time for complacency. Every team in the second division is dying to scrape points off of Corinthians, and a lot of them already have. Against better opposition we can’t afford to miss shots like this. We could still use a proper center-forward for the games where we’re not blessed without about 1,400 chances, and I’m not sure where Dentinho’s going to fit in when he comes back.

But, for now, I like what I see. Sometimes you just need a couple easy games at home to get your confidence back. If we can keep this football flowing at the Castelão on Saturday, I think the next few months will be happy ones for the nação corinthiana.