Dunga names former team mates as Brazil assistants
RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - New Brazil coach Dunga has named Andrey Lopes as his assistant manager and given former World Cup winners Taffarel and Mauro Silva places on his backroom team, the Brazilian Football Confederation said on Wednesday.
The little-known Lopes was Dunga's assistant when he coached Internacional last year.
Taffarel, who will be goalkeeping coach, played alongside Dunga when they won the World Cup in 1994, as did Mauro Silva, the former midfielder, who Dunga said would help him where and when needed.
They were among the 13 new names appointed to provide back up to Dunga, who was made national team coach on Tuesday.
"We are calling up players who were world champions so we have that DNA in our team," Gilmar Rinaldi, the technical director in charge of Brazil's men's, youth and women's sides, told a news conference in Rio de Janeiro.
"We want these professionals to be our critical eyes, pointing out where we can improve."
The appointments came the day after Dunga was named coach for a second time, replacing Luiz Felipe Scolari, who resigned after the World Cup where Brazil were hammered 7-1 by Germany in the semi-finals and beaten 3-0 by the Netherlands in the third-place playoff.
Although many critics cried out for an overhaul of the domestic game and the appointment of a foreign coach, Dunga was brought back as national team boss, four years after he failed to take Brazil beyond the quarter-finals of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
His new backroom staff are expected to be in place by next month before he takes charge of the team for friendlies against Colombia in Miami on September 5 and Ecuador in New Jersey four days later.
They also face Argentina in China in October and Turkey in Istanbul in November.
Their first competitive fixtures will be in next year's Copa America in Chile.
(Reporting by Rodrigo Viga Gaier in Rio de Janeiro; writing by Andrew Downie; editing by Toby Davis)
