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lands comes into sharper focus Wednesday when the defending champions must fend off World Cup elimination against Chile, less than a week into the tournament.
• Spain and 2010 runner-up Netherlands were expected to advance from Group B, but plenty of pundits -- including Brazilian great Pele -- tipped Chile as a genuine contender to progress at the expense of one of the European powers.
• The Chileans opened with a 3-1 win over Australia, and a second straight victory by the South Americans almost would certainly knock Spain out of the competition.
• The Dutch play Australia, the lowest-ranked team in the tournament, in the first of Wednesday's three matches. That is followed by Spain vs. Chile and the Group A match between Croatia and Cameroon.
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• RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) -- Do you speak futebol? With the World Cup in full swing, there's never been a better time to learn.
• For Brazilians, football is a whole language. Being so creative with their feet forces them to be creative with their tongues, too, to conjure new words and phrases for techniques and styles of play they've perfected in making the English game their own.
• Example: For Brazilians, a shot that rises sharply and then dips behind the goalkeeper into the net is a "folha seca" -- a dry leaf. Very poetic. That Brazilians see Mother Nature's handiwork in the languid, curvaceous up-then-down trajectory says a lot about how deeply they think about the game.
• Didi, a World Cup winner with Brazil in 1958 and 1962, was famed for his dry leaf free kicks. The confounding, opposition-twisting dribbling technique of 1970 World Cup winner Rivelino became known as the "elastico," which speaks for itself. And the overhead "bicicleta" kick, so called because players look like they're riding a bike upside down, is said to have been invented by Leonidas, a star of Brazil's 1934 and 1938 squads.
• Daniela Alfonsi, a director at the football museum in Sao Paulo, says Brazilians initially adopted English words when football first landed some 120 years ago, introduced by European-educated Brazilians, notably Charles Miller. So they would have said "goalkeeper" and "match" instead of "goleiro" and "partida" as they do now, she said.
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