Mano Menezes fixes his stern, piercing glare. “In Brazil, there is no middle ground”, he says. “Either we are doing really well, or we are doing really badly. Either we win the World Cup, or we lose, and everything is wrong.” Having spent two years at the centre of the storm, he would know. Menezes was brought in as Brazil manager after their exit at the quarter-final stage of the 2010 World Cup, charged with turning the team around and bringing in a new generation of players ahead of the 2014 tournament at home. Before accepting the job, Menezes recalls, he “tried to extract from the president [of Brazil’s football federation, the CBF,] what he expected from my work. And he requested that I attempt a renewal, a broadening of the horizon in terms of player call-ups. That is what we did, what we tried to do.” It worked. Not as quickly as they had hoped – the World Cup in 2014 came too soon – but the Selecao now seem to be reaping what Menezes sowed. Of the players in the current squad, he gave debuts to Coutinho, Danilo, Willian, Renato Augusto, Casemiro, Fernandinho and Paulinho. He also handed Neymar his first appearance in the canary yellow shirt immediately after the disappointment in South Africa. There had been huge pressure inside Brazil to take Neymar and his Santos team-mate Paulo Henrique Ganso – who at the time was rated just as highly – to that tournament, but Dunga decided they would not be needed. I ask Menezes if he remembers Neymar’s first steps at international level and a glint of fatherly pride creeps into his severe expression. “We went to play against the United States”, he recounts. “And Neymar was a boy. If we look at the photos from his first call-up, and compare them with the photos today, we can see that today he is a fully developed man and at that time he was a boy of just 18, 19. “But it was completely normal, calling them both up. People were already demanding that Dunga take them to the World Cup in South Africa. So, these two call-ups were almost unanimous. But as with all great players, all exceptionally different players, Neymar made his debut and scored a goal straight away.” Menezes, now back in Brazilian club football with Cruzeiro, was also keen to praise the PSG star’s much-discussed behaviour. “We never had problems in these two and a half years that I had in charge of the Selecao”, he tells me.

“We went to an Olympics together and won the silver medal – or lost the gold medal – in the final against Mexico. And we never had a problem of indiscipline with him. Never. Neymar was always ready to assume the responsibilities that we expected of him.

“[Now] he is the reference point of the team. He is one of the three best players in the world. He is capable of a piece of play that unbalances a game, or of getting an opponent sent off, or of giving a special assist to another player. Certainly, he helps the others to reach a higher level.” This Monday, in Samara, Neymar proved his worth once more, scoring one and setting up another as Brazil won 2-0 to secure their 7th consecutive World Cup quarter-final appearance. As fate would have it, the game was against the very same opponent Menezes’ Brazil faced in the Olympic final at Wembley.