In fact, during the lineup roll calls, only two people got booed: Fred, the famously embattled striker whom fans had been likening to a traffic cone in the parking lot outside and the manager, Luiz Felipe Scolari, who seems all but gone.īy the national anthem, it became obvious why Brazil hadn't disparaged this match like the Netherlands. And when the injured Neymar went to go sit on the bench, in uniform, and waved at his country from the JumboTron, the whole place squealed. The same went for Thiago Silva, the captain and defensive ballast, who'd been suspended for the so-called " Mineirazo" due to yellow cards. When keeper Julio Cesar walked out onto the grass for the first time, head down, the stadium gave him a heartfelt standing ovation - acknowledgment that he was not to blame for the collapse of the Selecao. Soon, you could track national forgiveness with a clap-o-meter. All 68,034 of us, to be specific, as the arena speakers would later announce.Īnd the roughly 67,000 Brazilians among us, still haunted by that 7-1 destruction by Germany, did a curious thing: They began to breathe life into each other. Damien Meyer/AFP/Getty Imagesīut show up we did. Louis van Gaal was not too pleased to play in the third-place playoff. No one, if we're all being honest with ourselves, looked particularly thrilled about showing up in the first place.
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People muttered to themselves, zombified. On my walk to the Estadio Nacional Mane Garrincha, sidewalk vendors limply blew their last remaining yellow horns. So the atmosphere before this match, as you can imagine, was rollicking.īrazil was going up against Van Gaal's Dutchmen - a clash of superpowers that might have otherwise stopped traffic across continents - and the city conveyed the emotional register of a person encountering a Pozidriv screw from IKEA for the first time. Or as the vice president of FIFA, Jim Boyce, said to the BBC: "My own personal opinion is that if it was to be stopped tomorrow, I would have no objection to that."
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I think it is very bad, it is really, really, very, very bad." Or as Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho put it when talking to Eurosport: "You lose a semifinal, you want to go home and cry, or you want to go home and get your wife and kids and go for a holiday, you don't want to play. The World Cup is about one thing only: the Cup." Or as Van Gaal's star winger, Arjen Robben, said shortly after that: "In my opinion, they should abolish it all together. But I said this 10 years or 15 years ago and nothing changed." This game has nothing to do with sports in my opinion. BRASILIA, Brazil - What is the point of this thing?Īn entire sport contemplated that question, in one voice, as soon as the participants in the third-place game were decided.Īs Netherlands manager Louis van Gaal said, minutes after losing to Argentina in the semifinal: "I think this match should never be played.