Where are they now?: Tostao

BRAZILIAN football reached its zenith in 1970 in Mexico, when the national team captured the World Cup for the third time and raised the game to a level of panache and elegance that outstripped even their own renowned standards.

Amid an abundance of ability, to stand out would require extraordinary qualities; yet it is accepted that Tostao, from the Cruzeiro club of Belo Horizonte, was the brilliant forward line's essential hub.

Members of the team are still feted. 'No Brazilian will ever forget 1970,' Tostao says. But whereas others have built careers from their fame - Gerson and Rivelino as television journalists, Jairzinho as a players' agent, Pele as a highly paid public relations figurehead - Eduardo Goncalvez de Andrade, as Tostao is otherwise known, has revealed talents of a much different kind.

Now 46, for the last 11 years he has been a professor of clinical psychology at a university in Belo Horizonte, his home town, about 200 miles north of Rio. 'I gave up my studies to play football but when I retired from the game in 1973 I went back. It took six years to qualify, another two to obtain my specialisation.'

His retirement was premature, forced by persistent eye problems caused by a training accident. Only after two operations to correct a detached retina could he play in Mexico. 'The 1970 team was the greatest of all,' he says. 'But I think the present Brazil is perhaps the best since then.'

(Photograph omitted)