How Brazil’s cynical World Cup campaign soured a great legacy and made implosion inevitable

 AS bizarre as it was to see Brazil humiliated in its own backyard in a World Cup semi-final, the reaction from many around the world was even more stunning.

While some expressed sympathy at seeing a great football nation brought to its knees, there was plenty of unrestrained glee as Germany piled four goals past goalkeeper Julio Cesar in that mind-bending six-minute spell.
That Brazil, a country so admired and beloved as the greatest exponents of the beautiful game in history, could be widely mocked, even despised, as it took a belting is arguably more disturbing than the scoreline itself.
So how did this happen?
Brazil had to win this tournament. Nothing else mattered. After last year’s mass public protests during the Confederations Cup sparked by the outrageous costs of hosting the tournament, nothing less than the soothing balm of a World Cup final victory would do.
That Confederations Cup, which saw Brazil waltz to victory led by the effervescent Neymar, gave hope that on-pitch glory could mask whatever unpleasantness might be occurring on nearby streets.
But outside of Neymar’s sparkle, Brazil was limited, and its hard-nosed coach Phil Scolari adopted a physical tactical policy that could be crudely described as ‘give it to Neymar and kick the opposition when we don’t have it’.
The team was also permitted, perhaps encouraged, to become swept up in the emotional maelstrom of its matches, belting out the pre-game anthem with such fervour that some players — including Neymar — broke down in tears before, during and after games.
Former internationals queued up to condemn such obvious unmanliness, while pundits muttered that expending that much mental energy could not possibly end well. But as Brazil made its way successfully, if gingerly, through the group stages, the match-day emotional rollercoaster tradition continued.
Those group stages displayed Brazil’s limitations for all to see as well as featuring some refereeing decisions that offered fodder to conspiracy theorists convinced that FIFA very much required the host nation’s presence in the tournament’s latter stages.
All of which made Scolari’s attempts to cultivate a victim mentality among his players and the Brazilian public all the more bizarre as he regularly alleged that the rest of the world didn’t want to see Brazil win the tournament and had written it off already.
The policy might have been winning few friends but it was getting results as Brazil edged out the popular Chileans and Colombians in the knockout stages after tense affairs.
The Colombia quarter-final was just minutes from the end when the unthinkable happened, Neymar felled after what appeared to be an innocuous collision with Colombia’s Juan Zeniga.
It’s difficult to imagine the effect this must have had on 200 million Brazilians. Neymar was Brazil at this World Cup. His was the face on every billboard and the front of every newspaper, his was the voice blaring out from every TV advertising every conceivable product.
A nation’s hopes rested on his slender shoulders from the very first kick of the tournament and it was to his eternal credit that he stood up under it, scoring four goals and never shying from his role as his team’s talisman.
Now he was lying on the ground screaming in agony. Even the medical team seemed to be rendered delirious by seeing their messiah stricken, as he was unceremoniously bundled onto a stretcher and lugged off the pitch. It later emerged he had fractured his vertebrae and his World Cup was over.
A nation fell into uncontrolled despair, as if Neymar had been murdered. Brazilian TV shows spent hours lamenting the incident and publicly denouncing Zeniga, demanding punishment, even prison, for the Colombian.
It all struck many outside the Brazilian bubble as a bit rich, considering Colombia’s own star player — James Rodriguez — had been kicked, shoved and barged throughout the match, with the referee remarkably reluctant to mete out punishment to repeat offenders.
Still Brazil’s victim mentality persisted and an entire nation worked itself up into an unprecedented frenzy ahead of the semi-final against Germany, another step along the road to inevitable glory.
There was even insane chatter that Neymar might yet play, that a broken back was no match for a nation’s manifest destiny. Mercifully, he did not, but David Luiz and Julio Cesar clutched at his jersey during the pre-match ceremonies, as if it belonged to a fellow soldier killed in battle.