A goal against Santos and Bolsonaro | He played a …

Santos, decades ago, ceased to be Santos de Pelé. Also Neymar. Now he seems subject to the whims of a character who has usurped the popular will, who repudiates even his twisted (inflated). A far-right upstart who scored a left-handed goal on April Fool’s Day at the Vila Belmiro stadium. He converted with an empty bow and collapsed like a cow on the grass while broadcasting live his grotesque Brasil TV, a friendly channel. Jair Bolsonaro with number ten on his back joined a charity party and completely spoiled it. When he was done, he improvised a press conference on the playground and said some typical autocratic nonsense. That in his policy of dealing with the pandemic “I made no mistake” and made fun of racism: “We can no longer play, everything is prejudiced”, he commented.

The story of the story has been featured by some Santos footballers who will play the semi-finals with Boca. Photos were taken with the president in the locker room, without jugular or distance, as if they adhered to his theory of fluzinha. Starting goalie João Paulo even uploaded the image to his Instagram profile. Marinho figure and one of the Copa Libertadores scorers took a selfie in the same dressing room without protection. Young Lucas Lourenço, one of the team’s attacking midfielders, was also seen. The scenes showed a surprising anomie in the team led by the experienced Cuca.

Last November, the technician caught the virus and was hospitalized for a week in São Paulo. Eleven players suffered from the same Covid-19 infection. But unlike his supervisors, who are already 57 years old, the coach is almost at the limit of patients with the greatest risk of life. He himself confessed: “My family and I have gone through difficult times. I lost my stepfather, but you have to be strong, continue with life ”. The last line is almost a maxim taken from the manual of good contagion that the soldier has become who first underestimated and then downplayed the virus. While giving advice to Vila Belmiro on one side of the pitch, another player was already suffering from the disease: full-back Fernando Pileggi. Even this outbreak of the past month has not intimidated Santos deniers, with its president as its emblem.

Orlando Rollo – he’s on the verge – was seen smiling sitting next to the president and without a mask or mask, as he is called in Brazil the fabric protector that saves lives. The scene seemed pre-pandemic, when the world couldn’t imagine the long debates around methods of containment or the discredited herd theory. Even the club issued a statement as if nothing had happened: “Santos FC have received the country’s highest authority in their stadium for a charity event”.

A week after the first game against Boca in La Bombonera, the team flirted with the disease which in the neighboring country – according to the latest statistics from its Ministry of Health – has already caused 192,681 deaths and has a total of 7,563,551 infected. If the Vila Belmiro event had happened on the Argentinos Juniors court with a visit by Alberto Fernández to the team led by Diego Dabove and of which he is a fan, the president would be crushed by the steamroller of the local press and “independent” which it feeds on the official guideline of the state.

One last clarification: Bolsonaro is not even from Santos, but from Palmeiras, River’s rival in the Cup semi-final. When he visited Vila Belmiro during the electoral campaign in 2018, Torcida Jovem did not receive him well: “We repudiate the political platform what this visit means and we stress that the ideological positions of Bolsonaro are incompatible with the social, racial, ethnic and cultural pluralism of the supporters of Santos and the whole history of the struggle of the Youth Party against the military dictatorship, hailed by this politician. In addition, Bolsonaro is supporting a rival team from the capital, which makes his presence in the stadium even more unnecessary. Strictly speaking, it supports several and not just Palmeiras. He used the passion for football to bring water to his mill, which was increasingly dry in credibility.