The top 10 reasons to love Brazil

Great article from "The Sunday Times" (UK):

The top 10 reasons to love Brazil

1 Football fans
Supplemented by local members of the Brazilian diaspora, they appear in their thousands, are not over-troubled by gratuitous displays of near-nudity and often attract the eye of the world’s cameramen. Like Jade Goody, but for different reasons, they make everybody else feel good about themselves.

2 Kaka
Control yourselves, ladies, he is recently married. And if you were thinking of having a good time, remember too that Milan’s highly rated playmaker Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite is also an evangelical Christian. Still, ladies, the Good Lord has indeed provided him with a fine set of cheekbones and a come-hither smile. Even if it only means come hither to church.

3 Beach volleyball
To a Brazilian, it is the apotheosis of almost superhuman combat, combining teamwork, intense fitness, power and accuracy. Those who suggest it’s an opportunity for low-budget satellite TV stations to ogle the jiggling of bikini-clad, olive-skinned women miss the point entirely.

4 Ronaldinho
Ronaldinho looks like a rabbit and has its sexual stamina, too. Hence the testimony of lapdancer Lisa Collins, who bedded him and later gasped to The Sun: “By the eighth time that night I was exhausted.” Crikey.

5 Ronaldo
As Luke Chadwick would testify, being a footballer does not make you the most handsome millionaire on the block. Ronaldo Luiz Nazario da Lima is and always will be rather tubby. Yet his success as a (sort of) athlete has given succour to fellow tubbies the world over. Remarkably, he has apparently had sex, too.

6 Ayrton Senna
In 1994 Senna’s funeral was a state occasion and brought São Paolo to a standstill. That he was almost crazed in pursuit of speed, that his row with Alain Prost was one of the great feuds in sporting history and that he would (and perhaps did, the evidence is inconclusive) sell his own grandmother for a better place on the starting grid, means nothing.

7 Pele
Arguably the greatest footballer the world has ever seen, but certainly the proud possessor of the most mellifluous voice the world has ever heard. And everybody loves him, mainly because whichever country he’s visiting is the one he erroneously tips to be the next force in world football. Just don’t go into business with him — or mention his controversial stint as sports minister.

8 Mexico 1970
Pele. Tostao. Rivelino. Jairzinho. All of them in the same team at the same time. Truly, the planets had aligned during that memorable June. We shall not see their like again. We had not seen their like before. They even had a weak defence and a comedy goalkeeper, the far from feline Felix, to give the others a chance.

9 Rafael Scheidt
Crazy name, crazy guy. The then Celtic manager John Barnes purchased him for £4.8m after seeing a craftily edited video. The end came when Martin O’Neill apparently told him: “I like footballers who are not like you. Ones who play well.”

10 Milene Domingues
English football can offer Coleen and her shopping. The former model and former Mrs Ronaldo is an accomplished footballer in her own right. The green-eyed minx holds the world’s keepy-uppy record, managing to keep the ball up a mere 55,187 times. Beat that Posh Spice.

posted by nscafuro @ 7:55 AM