Brazil's devastating semifinal loss casts nation into deep mourning
SAO PAULO --
The consensus is that it could have been worse. There were reports of eight buses being set on fire in Sao Paulo and minor scuffles in the stadium in Belo Horizonte, but generally the reaction to Brazil's 7-1 World Cup semifinal loss to Germany was one not of anger but of shock.
The crowd in the Mineirao cycled through a range of scapegoats; from president Dilma Rousseff to Brazil's Fred and attacking midfielders Oscar and Bernard. Fans booed the team en masse after the final whistle, but the emotion was unfocused and irrational. Police in Rio de Janeiro deployed armored personnel carriers but torrential rain kept people off the streets and perhaps helped prevent conflagration. Perhaps the defeat was simply too incomprehensible to provoke the sort of violent response Brazilian authorities had clearly feared.
Certainly in Belo Horizonte, there was fear that the fury could direct itself into either anti-government protests or more general lawlessness. Thousands gathered in the district of Savassi, drinking on the streets. Yet, there was no sense of any potential trouble; rather just lots of people wandering disconsolately about, splashing through rivers of urine and spilled beer, wondering what on earth had just happened. The mood was downbeat with an ounce of rage. Rather there was a feeling that an emotional bubble had been pricked.
In truth, that was probably part of the problem. The nation had been whipped into a state of mass hysteria by manager Luiz Felipe Scolari and the Brazilian media. Last week, Scolari suggested nobody had expected Brazil to get out of the group stage and wasn't laughed out of the press conference. Any semblance of rationality had been lost. Scolari, as he always does, generated a siege mentality believing that everybody was against him and his team. He somehow casted Brazil as the plucky underdogs despite its rich history and intimidating home crowds which influenced referees in at least two games, something that Neymar's injury played into.
The remarkable solipsism of this Brazil side was obvious during the anthems before the semifinal. There was no minute of silence for either the two people who had been crushed to death when an overpass -- built as part of the World Cup infrastructure -- had collapsed in Belo Horizonte a week earlier, nor for Argentine great Alfredo Di Stefano. Yet somehow, David Luiz and Julio Cesar did manage to hold a No. 10 Neymar shirt and seemed to struggle to hold back the tears.
This was more than the usual pressure on hosts. This was part of a state of heightened emotion in which Scolari had been, at the very least, complicit. Brazil, both players and crowd, each egging the other on, began in a frenzy, as exemplified by two incidents. After 10 minutes, Marcelo lost possession, chased back and made a fine tackle in conceding a corner. The crowd roared. It was a bizarre response -- yes, the tackle was was good -- but it was only necessitated by a moment of sloppiness and still left Brazil to defend a corner. The reaction was that of a nation on the edge of sanity, desperate to salute anything its players did, heedless of danger. It was from that corner that Thomas Muller put Germany ahead.
A few minutes later, Marcelo ran through and was cleanly tackled by Philipp Lahm. It was manifestly a good challenge, yet Marcelo appealed desperately for a penalty, an action that spoke of a sense of self-entitlement on the part of Brazil that bordered on the narcissistic. Germany's players had been booed even stepping off the bus, which seemed part of the same impulse; the opponent was seen as an obstacle to victory rather than respected as fellow warriors. Once the prospect of victory dissipated -- and did so not with one goal, not with a moment of controversial refereeing, but with what Scolari termed a "blackout" -- there was merely deflation as Brazil conceded four goals in six minutes.
The newspapers tended to reflect the shock and sadness rather than seeking anybody to blame. Many showed the faces of weeping fans, their face paint running with the tears; "The defeat of defeats" said the headline of Gazeta do Povo; "Massacre," roared A Gazeta; "Humiliation," screamed O Liberal and Comercio; "The greatest fiasco in history," said Diario de Santa Maria; "An embarrassment for eternity," said the Correio Braziliense; Metro and A Tarde both went with black front pages; Metro's a night sky with the scoreboard in the bottom of the frame; A Tarde's a death notice for the dream of the World Cup.
The focus was on the scale of the defeat and the level of embarrassment. Brazil was perhaps too humiliated to be angry. Scolari and the players both spoke of the importance of preparing for the third-place playoff, something teams rarely take seriously. This time, it offers an opportunity to save face.
