The final draw of the games in the group stage of FIFA World Cup in South Africa next year has just finished: Brazil will play its opening game against North Korea, on June 15th at Ellis Park Stadium in Johannesburg.
The second match will be against Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivoire), whose great footballer is Drogba, on June 20th at Soccer City Stadium, in the same city.

And finally Brazil will face Portugal, whose best player nowadays is Cristiano Ronaldo, on June 25th, in Durban, to define their position in
group G and a shift to the quarter-finals, in which our Seleção will play, if qualified as best team in the group, the second best in group H (and vice versa), which has Spain, Switzerland, Honduras and Chile.

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Check all the groups:

Group A: South Africa, Mexico, Uruguay, France
Group B: Argentina, Nigeria, Korea Republic, Greece
Group C: England, USA, Algeria, Slovenia
Group D: Germany, Australia, Serbia, Ghana,
Group E: Netherlands, Denmark, Japan, Cameroon
Group F: Italy, Paraguay, New Zealand, Slovakia
Group G: Brazil, Korea DPR, Côte d’Ivoire, Portugal
Group H: Spain, Switzerland, Honduras, Chile

Our great Angel With Bent Legs, Manuel Francisco dos Santos, a.k.a. Mané Garrincha or just Garrincha, was born in Pau Grande, Rio de Janeiro, in 1933, and died in 1983.

He is and always will be our (Brazilian) eternal hero in 1958 FIFA World Cup (Sweden) and 1962 (Chile), along with our other great players.

Mané Garrincha represents soccer fantasy, imagination, the dream that every Brazilian boy dreams of what he could do on the pitch.
Our homeland is very happy, for we had Mané to fill us with pure creativity, even though he was almost always repeating the same dribble, as our wonderful journalist Armando Nogueira used to state in his newspaper articles. Garrincha was also nicknamed in Brazil as Joy of the People.
It’s really worth watching the fantastic videos of our Mané in black and white, at the time when he played on Botafogo, or on the National Team (Seleção).

Garrincha is from a mythical time in which there were big Titans in soccer, and thank God, many of them played on the soccer fields here in the tropics.

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To celebrate and recall Pele’s famous 1,000th Goal, which took place
40 years ago, on November 19th, 1969, scored at
Maracanã Stadium, against Vasco da Gama, during the Silver Cup tournament (Taça de Prata), I have inserted below videos with images of that happening.

The goalkeeper who took the one thousandth goal by the King of Football was Andrada, Vasco da Gama’s Argentinian goalkeeper. Santos won the game by 2
x 1. The referee who awarded the penalty kick was Manuel Amaro de
Lima and the defender who committed the foul was the back Fernando (who
still today denies having committed the penalty foul, saying that Pele
stumbled on his leg and the referee was just trying to please Pele and the crowd of fans, who wanted to see the King’s goal).

Edson Arantes do Nascimento (Pele’s given name),
Athlete of the Century (title given by the International Olympic Committee), was 69 years old last October 20^th (he was born on October 20^th, 1940).

Our King of Football always deserves our respects, for
everything he did for football and Brazil. More information about his career can be found in his website.

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