There is a lot of luck in football. Following England is like following Wycombe Wanders or Leyton Orient. You hope for the best and hope you are lucky.
In doing your work in the great world, it is a safe plan to follow a rule I once heard on the football field: Don't flinch, don't fall; hit the line hard.
Football is a whole skill to itself. A whole world. A whole universe to itself. Me love it because you have to be skilful to play it! Freedom! Football is freedom.
Jorge Luis Borges had the soapbox and the authority to complain about this myopic understanding of the duty of Latin American writers, which sometimes forecloses their unique modernism and experience of modernization in favor of a mythic past or an artificially constructed ideal national subject. So likewise in João Gilberto Noll, readers shouldn't expect samba and Carnival and football. The Brazilian national identity is not one of his primary concerns.
To borrow a simile from the football field, we believe that men must play fair, but that there must be no shirking, and that the success can only come to the player who hits the line hard.
The club continued to make significant player decisions without involving me. In the end such a breach of trust and confidence meant that I had no option but to leave.