Competitive streak is not always the No 1 priority for some

National sides all keep an eye on their No 1s but to some it matters not if they are playing, writes Ian Hawkey.

His may not be playing for Queens Park Rangers right now, but Julio Cesar, is still the No 1 option at goalkeeper for Brazil, says national team manager Felipe Scolari.

For Julio Cesar, the transfer window cannot open swiftly enough.

The World Cup begins in 169 days. He has not played a competitive match for almost six months. He has not seen any club action since the second week of April.

Yet he is Brazil’s No 1 goalkeeper, an instantly recognised figure, and one half of a power couple with his TV presenter and actress wife Susana Werner, in a nation preparing for the biggest global event in its history.

The same Julio Cesar is also an unused squad player at Queens Park Rangers of the Championship, the second tier of English football. The high salary that club agreed to pay the 34 year old 18 months ago when they recruited him from Inter Milan was set at a Premier League level, and it has become a considerable burden to QPR since they were relegated last May.

Julio Cesar has been firmly instructed to move. The imminence of the World Cup clearly gives him an extra motive to do so.

“If you are not playing every week, you won’t play for me,” Luis Felipe Scolari, Brazil’s head coach, said earlier this year. He was speaking generally of the guiding principles he will apply to selecting his squad for next summer’s tournament.

But Scolari also seemed prepared to bend those rules. “Even though he might not be playing regularly, Julio Cesar is indispensable,” Scolari said more recently.

How indispensable is what Julio Cesar must ask himself. If the possibility exists that, in the next 169 days, an alternative No 1 could impress Scolari enough to depose the veteran and former Uefa Champions League winner in Brazil’s hierarchy, his state of underemployment could deny him his finest-ever achievement.

At the back of his mind is also the chance that to move now, coming into a new club mid-season, means an adaptation that might be awkward. Any penalty-area gaffes will be projected all the more because of his unusual situation, the importance of Brazil’s home World Cup.

Sunderland are said to be interested in Julio Cesar, and he would be busy there. They are bottom of the Premier League. More likely is a move to a Brazilian club, a chance to play where Scolari can watch him live. In the next month, the open transfer window will be unusually animated by goalkeepers, several of them high-profile, a number of them thinking not just of improved conditions a move might offer but how a change of scene could affect their World Cup status.

Scan through the heavyweights preparing for Brazil 2014 and a bizarrely large number share a critical concern over the morale, reliability and potential rustiness of their first-choice goalkeeper.

Iker Casillas remains Spain’s captain and first-choice goalkeeper, but since being dropped from the Real Madrid first XI by the head coach Jose Mourinho in February, Casillas has understudied Diego Lopez for his club in all league matches. Mourinho’s successor, Carlo Ancelotti, has made Casillas first choice in the Champions League, but that seems a less than ideal compromise.

Spain’s manager, Vicente Del Bosque, has a number of fine custodians to take to Brazil.

Of Victor Valdes, the Barcelona keeper, Del Bosque remarked: “He has been under pressure not to accept the situation” of being Spain’s second – or third – choice, while Casillas sits most weekends on the Real Madrid bench.

Joe Hart, England’s No 1, was dropped by Manchester City in October and only last weekend given the chance to re-establish himself, ahead of the Romanian Costel Pantilimon, as his club’s best gloveman. The lack of competition for England’s No 1 spot makes his international start safer than most.

Argentina’s head coach, Alex Sabella, finds himself in the same position as Scolari. Sergio Romero is his most trusted keeper, as he was for Sabella’s predecessor, Sergio Batista.

Romero joined monied Monaco on loan from Sampdoria last August. Yet the move has erected more barriers than opened doors to the top level of European club football Romero has long sought. He is yet to make his Ligue 1 debut, deemed second pick behind Monaco’s Croatian Danijel Subasic.

Sabella took the unusual step, six months before the World Cup, of naming the three keepers he intended to take to Brazil, Romero designated the senior of them. The idea was to give confidence to a player whose club situation is in danger of demoralising him.

Goalkeepers require special handling in such circumstances. Many coaches reckon the gloveman’s lonely, vulnerable role means he needs to carry into games the belief he is the absolute No 1 and should never be looking over his shoulder at a competitor.

The counter-argument, often applied to Hart during his erratic 2013, is that a lack of competition for his place can create complacency in a goalkeeper.

A few years ago, when France were world and European champions, their first-choice keeper, Fabien Barthez, lost his starting place at Manchester United.

The France coach at the time, Jacques Santini, continued to select Barthez, maintaining not only that unwavering faith was crucial to the custodian’s effectiveness, but that goalkeeper was one position in which squad rotation should never apply, and also that for a keeper, weekly matchday action was less crucial than for an outfielder.

Thorough work in practice on reactions, groundspeed and anticipation were the key areas of preparation, Santini said. With an outfield player, the vigour of tackles and the speed of competitive situations were something training sessions could less ably replicate.

Italy continued to select Gianluigi Buffon while he was playing in Serie B for Juventus. He had dropped a division, but that did not mean the shots he had to save came at him any softer, it was argued.

But how rusty is too rusty? Julio Cesar and Romero would rather not have to test that issue in the New Year. Casillas and Hart hope the question will not be asked of them. For the coaches of various other nations, it probably will.

Ghana, who reached the quarter-finals of the past World Cup with a keeper, Richard Kingson, who was a non-playing third choice at Wigan Athletic at the time, are concerned that their No 1, Fatau Dauda, has not yet made a league appearance for the South African club Orlando Pirates, whom he joined in August.

Australia, disappointed at the international retirement of Mark Schwarzer, hope the fact that Mitchell Langerak has played eight times in the Bundesliga in his three and half years with Borussia Dortmund will not leave him awestruck when he faces the formidable challenge of keeping Spain, Holland and Chile at bay in June.

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