On June 12, 1938 the football team from Brazil played versus Czechoslovakia. It was one of the bloodiest matches in the World Football League. That day, at five in the afternoon, and in the Parc Lescure field, both teams performed a battle that left them with nine men in each side and no winner.
They were even with one goal and that was not the most relevant thing, but what marked this game into history was the violence in the 90 minutes at Burdeos Stadium.
The first players out of the game were in minute 12, when the South Americans Zeze and Machado went for the Czech star Oldrich Nejedly whom they broke his ankle in a brutal entrance. Zeze Procopio protested and he was expelled two minutes later. However, Nejedly played a good time of the game in those conditions because there was not the possibility of replacement by that time. No matter his serious injure, he managed to do his job in the penalty that tied to one in minute 65.
But that foul just exacerbated the spirit of the match that was similar to a ring in the remaining time. Two more players were also out of the game just a minute before the end: Brazilian Machado and the Czech Jan Riha.
In the rest of the game there prevailed the physical excesses. A real slaughter at the style of the Roman circus that was witnessed in that French locality, that also left, besides three players expelled, a balance of five players injured from them two were immediately taken to emergency.
The worst part by the Czechs was for Nejedly and the goalkeeper Frantisek Planicka who finished the game with his right arm broken. But, as no one escapes unharmed at war, Brazilians saw how the rest of their players were injured because they could not escape from the boots of their rivals.
The clash repeated two days after in the same place to define the pass to the semifinals. But by then, both hosts were decimated.
This way the Brazilians tried to made a team of ¡nine substitutes!, because from 11 regular just the star offensive Leonidas and archer Walter Goulart were able to play.
Meanwhile, on the part of the Europeans five of the men saw the match from the bench.
On June 14, Brazil will manage to get the victory 2-1 and peace among football players was reestablished in a game that ended with neither injured nor expelled players, although this duel was left at the shadow of violence for 48 hours before in front of 22,021 people, in Burdeos’ Battle.
