The selection raised eyebrows in São Paulo and delight almost everywhere else. Three forwards with a combined 21 caps started a competitive fixture together for the first time, and by the half hour they had produced the best passage of Brazilian attacking play in two years.
The system is less romantic than the personnel. A rest-defence of four, a single pivot who almost never crosses halfway, and licence for the front three to invert, overlap and swap in whatever order the pitch suggests.
It will be tested by better opposition. But the point of a rebuild is to fail early and cheaply, and this squad now knows what its ceiling looks like.
