Goiania, Brazil: Coach Luiz Felipe Scolari is eager to get Brazil's World Cup campaign underway and wishes the tournament was starting right now.
Scolari said Monday that although it would be good to have more time to better prepare the squad ahead of the June 12 opener, there's no point trying to do too much this close to the tournament.
"It would be good to have another week," Scolari said of the team's preparations. "But at the same time, deep inside me, knowing that my team will be prepared, I wanted it to start now. It's time to get this thing going."
With 10 days left before Brazil faces Croatia in Sao Paulo, Scolari said that after the World Cup starts there's not a lot to think about.
"There's no point to keep waiting. Things will either to be OK or go wrong, after it starts it's do or die," he said following the team's final practice ahead of a warm-up against Panama.
It will be the team's second to last match before the opener in Sao Paulo next week. The final tuneup is against Serbia on Friday, also in Sao Paulo.
Scolari, who will be trying to win his second World Cup with Brazil after leading the 2002 team to the title, said that this time he has been having mixed-feelings ahead of the tournament.
"There are days that I'm calm and at ease," he told a media conference at the Serra Dourada Stadium in the central city of Goiania. "But there are days that things are not right, I can't sleep, I keep agonizing inside. Then you have to go find a solution, it's what we do."
Scolari was clearly upset on Sunday after the team's training session at its training camp outside Rio de Janeiro. He said he didn't like how the team practiced and felt that it didn't have the same attitude that it had been displaying so far.
"We had been playing a certain way during the friendlies and the Confederations Cup, we can't change that now, we can't lose our identity," said Scolari, who complained that the starters gave too much space for counterattacks during the practice on Sunday.
"We can't forget that we are 10 days away from the World Cup," he said. "I can't let them forget that."
