Brazil manager Luiz Felipe Scolari holds court on his return to Stamford Bridge

No one could have mistaken Stamford Bridge for the Copacabana yesterday. Brazil were training for their friendly against Russia on Chelsea’s home pitch while apparently kitted out for a trek across Antarctica. Snoods, woolly hats and gloves were the minimum defence against the elements. After a trip to a freezing Geneva for their previous friendly at the weekend, their ambitious world tour, designed to promote Brazil’s sunshine way of football around the globe, appears stuck in perpetual winter. “We are suffering from this cold,” their captain, Chelsea’s David Luiz, said. “But we have to get used to it.” Even the Russians appeared ­disturbed by a wind biting in from their homeland. They arrived in London after their game against Northern Ireland was called off twice at the weekend due to the unseasonal freeze in Belfast. “It was absolutely impossible to play,” their manager Fabio Capello said of the conditions at Windsor Park. “We prefer to play with a normal pitch. Not snow, not wind, not rain. The weather was terrible.” Still, the chill hanging about Stamford Bridge must have been familiar to one of the participants in tonight’s friendly. The last time Brazil coach Luiz Felipe Scolari was in west London it was February 2009, when he took charge of Chelsea’s Premier League game with Hull City. After an insipid 0-0 draw, he was frozen out, the fourth of Roman Abramovich’s eight managerial ­defenestrations.