- The press rightfully refer to this as the Mineirazo. Even the FIFA website calls it that. Whereas the social repercussions cannot compare to the long-standing shame and significance of the Maracanazo in 1950, from a footballing standpoint this is much worse. It is one thing to lose a tight final 1-2, but quite another to be routed 1-7.
- The "net value" of the match was a 3-goal German victory. After the initial Muller goal, Brazil reacted normally as most teams do when they're down 0-1 in an important match. They held possession, they were aggressive but not reckless, and they created chances. Klose's 0-2 goal dumbfounded them, and while they yet retained a semblance of order, they made the mistake of throwing themselves forward and leave the back almost uncovered. By the 20th minute the mid had fallen apart, leaving vast prairies for the Germans to penetrate with quick counters. (I'll spare you the obvious blitzkrieg jokes).
- When you're down, you must defend. That is an unwritten law of football because your first priority is to ensure that you don't concede more. There will be time to attack later. Teams that fail to abide by this rule usually go down by more than one goal quite quickly. Last night's Brazil was a vivid example.
- It takes a special kind of psychological breakdown to concede three consecutive goals. When Klose scored (0-2) the Brazilian players were visibly scared. When Kroos scored (0-3), they went into full panic mode. Kroos' second (0-4) started from a clever steal at midfield from a totally unaware Dante, and nobody covered; their legs must have felt like stone. Khedira's goal (0-5) was the result of disorderly ball management from the Brazil mid, who by that time was in complete disarray. The look on Fred's face after both the 3rd and 4th goals says it all: they were terrified and had no idea what was going on. I don't think it even registered until the halftime whistle. In a sense, Germany played alone for much of the first half.
- Germany also deserve immense praise. First of all, even when teams who are down a goal or two make the mistake of attacking instead of defending, you don't generally get to score more than one goal. Germany had exactly three chances after the 0-2 and capitalized on all three: (1) a simple and organized offensive with two-touch passes ending in Kroos' shot from the edge; (2) Khedira's lucid and altruistic pass to Kroos when he might have scored himself, but he knew Kroos was better positioned; and (3) a fast Muller-Klose-Kroos counter ending in Khedira's goal. Offense doesn't get more cynical than that. With surgical precision they did exactly what they had to, with absolutely nothing fancy or spectacular. Clearly that's easier to do when you're playing against a team of doorstops, but many teams still fail to run up the score when they can because of reverence, cold feet, or the desire to show off. Not the Germans. They remained cool and they executed.
- Germany genuinely tried to continue scoring for the entire game. Even though it was 0-5 at 29', they didn't stop there and created three more clear chances that they failed to convert purely accidentally; would have gone to halftime up 0-8 if they could have. And mind you, they made no big push and showed no animosity. They simply continued to play their game, tackling decisively but not violently, countering quickly but not desperately, defending sparsely but not taking any risks. They even contested a few referee calls, as they would continue to do well into the second half (the ref himself, the Moreno Rodriguez of Italy-Uruguay infamy, was probably relieved that his mistakes didn't really matter last night).
- Germany simply ignored the scoreline. That is the very thing that Brazil failed to do, and ultimately it cost them the game. Relatedly, I have already written in the past about the ethics of running up the score in lopsided games. TL;DR = it's the most respectful thing to do and it would be humiliating not to.
- Brazilian players displayed good sportsmanship. Despite their footballing shortcomings, they were not aggressive toward Germans as lesser teams could have been; perhaps they were too confused and humiliated to do anything at all. That is a good thing, for it would have added to their shame if they had been sore losers on top of it all. However, at the end of the game they should have done a better job of apologizing to the crowd instead of huddling together and hope for some reprieve to come from the stands. David Luiz partially made up for that in his heartfelt official interview, as did Scolari himself. Speaking of which...
- Scolari assumed full responsibility even though he had almost none. No matter how badly the team plays, ultimately the coach is responsible. It is less clear what this will spell for his future on the bench. "Felipão" led Brazil to a World Cup title in 2002 and a Confederations Cup in 2013; in-between, he took Portugal to the Euro final in 2004 and to a World Cup third place in 2006. More importantly, Scolari is to be praised for even taking Brazil this far. He managed to advance to yesterday's semifinal with a team devoid of any major talent outside of Neymar and that looks nothing at all like the holy Seleção of Ronaldo, Rivaldo, and Ronaldinho. (Remember when Brazil was a striker-making machine? Now they have Hulk and Fred -- heaven help them). So even though Scolari will rightfully take the blame in public, the blame is not his. He literally did the best he could with this team, and if football was fair, yesterday Brazil would have lost something like 0-3. The rest is on the players.
- Saturday's game will decide the near future of Brazilian football. I mean not only of these players and coaching staff, but perhaps of the next generation of Brazilian footballers. Never has a third-place match mattered so much. Italy (1990) and Germany (2006) also lost the semifinal and went on to finish third. When you're the host country and you've let everyone down, the least you can do is get right back up after the fall. But for Brazil that is more complicated. Whatever they do, the shame of this Mineirazo will never be washed. A win on Saturday is irrelevant: the only thing that matters is not to lose big again, or Brazilian football may be thrown into a Dark Age. Both the Netherlands and Argentina, and especially the latter, would be more than glad to be the co-catalysts of such an event. I can only imagine with what mindset the shell-shocked Brazilian players will approach the third-place final...
- That being said, sometimes football federations are reborn from their own ashes. By the end of the 1990s, Germany had been in a bad slump for a few years. They had managed to squeeze through a Euro 1996 title with the unlikely magic of Bierhoff and Sammer (LOL), but it was evident that the golden generation of Klinsmann, Matthaus, Breheme, Kohler, and Moller would not be succeeded by an equally talented Mannschaft. So they changed everything. For one, they forced the development of youth talent by passing laws that criminalized teams whose balances weren't in the black. If professional teams can't spend more money than they have, they must turn to the cheaper youth sector: Lahm, Podolski, Klose, Schweinsteiger, and more recently Muller and Kroos, were all picked from that tree. Second, they tapped into the yet-unexploited streak of ethnic diversity. For decades Germany has been a melting pot of Turks, Arabs, and Southern Europeans, yet these rarely played football for Germany at the highest level. Aggressive diversifying campaigns resulted in Ozil, Boateng, Khedira, Gomez, Cacau, and many more; plus, of course, Polish-born players like Podolski and Klose.
- The same general spirit should drive Brazilian football, even if the example above does not apply to them directly, for their racial and social makeup is inherently (if uneasily) multicultural. Quite simply, if something ceases to work, you must change it, and be radical about it. Brazilian football has been working the same exact way for 80 years. Spectacular and incredibly intense (but financially poor) home leagues plus a large number of exports. That has worked, but it is no longer working, because since 2002 -- that's twelve years ago, mind you -- Brazil has been a very underwhelming team, and as I already said they didn't even deserve to advance this far into this World Cup. Perhaps they should experiment with reversing that trend, as Germans and Spaniards and French also have when in trouble: play less abroad and reboot the system from the ground up at home.
I have watched the game twice more since last night, and this is all I have at this time. Unless something even more outrageous happens in the next three games, this World Cup will probably be remembered as: (a) the perfect embodiment of the Beautiful Game; and, most ironically, (b) the one when Brazil got spanked. Again.
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