Five players who have caught the eye in the 2013 Campeonato Brasileiro

After just six months of fraught Sunday-Wednesday-Sunday action, the 2013 Campeonato Brasileiro is nearly over. Cruzeiro have already wrapped up the title, but their players are not the only ones deserving of credit this term.

In my latest Yahoo! Eurosport column, I pick out five players who have caught the eye during the season. They include a fleet-footed dribbler, a heavyweight striker and a midfielder who will be very familiar with most football fans. Click here to have a read.

A bad case of the Flu: Deposed champions Fluminense fighting for their lives

A year ago last week, Fluminense beat Palmeiras to lift their fourth Brazilian title. If the occasion felt a little flat, it was only because the success had long had an air of inevitability about it: spurred on by the relentless goalscoring of Fred and guided by Abel Braga’s steady hand, the Tricolor simply ground down their closest rivals, Atlético Mineiro and Grêmio.

“They're a good team, an organised team,” said former Brazil striker Tostão, now a respected newspaper columnist, at the time. “Flu know how to win. They don't lose focus and they don't try to be better than they are.”

But things have gone pear-shaped this year. As the end of the season approaches Fluminense sit just one point above the relegation zone, a winless October having plunged them from midtable mediocrity into a frantic battle for survival. They have three games to avoid becoming the first club to be demoted a year after winning Série A.

Read the rest of my latest Yahoo! Eurosport column here.

Fantastic Mr Fox: Party starts early as peerless Cruzeiro cruise to Brazilian title

It was just another win, but somehow also not. They celebrated as if they had won the title, jumping, singing, high-fiving. Crowding round the mildly sinister (it’s the blue moustache) cartoon fox for photos. Tipping buckets of iced water over one another.

The crowd, too, went ice-cream-in-winter crazy. It would be their last glimpse of their champions in their natural habitat until the new year. The party, it seemed safe to assume, would last well into the night.

Let when a trophy was lifted, it was only the home-made-souvenir type. For fate had conspired against them, if only gently. Read the rest of this article on Cruzeiro's slightly premature but entirely deserved title celebrations here.

Making sense of the senseless: On the bizarre new-look Campeonato Paulista

A month ago I wrote about Common Sense FC, the informal players’ union set up to agitate for change to the Brazilian football calendar. The movement has gained even more traction in the weeks since, with membership swelling and the head honchos of the game – never ones to neglect the chance to hitch their horses to a popular cause – voicing support.

So far, so positive. But just when lucidity and reason appeared to be storming the gates of the madhouse, someone had to go and do something stupid.

The guilty party on this occasion was the head of the São Paulo state football association (FPF), Marco Polo Del Nero – a man whose appetite for discovery is rather more modest than that of his more famous Venetian namesake, fixated, as it is, only upon the limits of his own idiocy.

Read my latest Yahoo! Eurosport article, on the new São Paulo state championship format, here.

Wildcard city: Five players who could play themselves into Brazil's World Cup squad

By now, Luiz Felipe Scolari has already identified most of the players who – barring injury or a drastic loss of form – will represent Brazil at next summer’s World Cup. The base of the squad that performed so well at the Confederations Cup will be maintained, with Felipão thought to have 17 or 18 names in mind even at this early stage.

Yet there remain places to be won. In my latest piece for WhoScored, I look at five players who could be dark horses for Scolari’s squad based on their performances in Brazil. Have a read of it here.

Variations on a theme: With his World Cup blueprint sorted, Scolari can afford to explore his options

As countries from every corner of the globe fought for their places at the 2014 World Cup this weekend, the hosts of next summer’s tournament had a rather more relaxed assignment. The Never-Ending Friendlies Tour (sounds like a Wedding Present album, that) took Brazil to the Far East, where they beat South Korea and Zambia.

Neither game was particularly thrilling. The first, in Seoul’s imaginatively named World Cup Stadium, was a scruffy, niggly affair, lit up only by a Neymar free-kick and a typically assured finish from Oscar. From there, Luiz Felipe Scolari and his charges hopped over to Beijing to see off the Copper Bullets with a businesslike display.

My latest Yahoo! Eurosport column, on Brazil's growing confidence ahead of the World Cup, can be read here.

A rope for Dopey: Dunga the latest to learn that Brazilian football waits for no man

The best manager in the world to share a name with one of the Seven Dwarfs is out of work again.

Dunga (‘Dopey’ in Portuguese) was dismissed by Internacional last week, just 10 months after taking over at the Porto Alegre club. His stewardship yielded 26 wins in 53 games, but a winless streak in September proved too difficult for the club’s hierarchy to ignore.

Read the rest of this article, on the former Brazil boss, on the Yahoo! Eurosport website.