BEAT DOWN IN BELO HORIZONTE

A look at the “Red Wedding” of football

REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach

I grew up in a football mad nation. The capital city of Dhaka would come to a virtual standstill when national heavyweights Abahani & Mohammedan would lock horns in a league match or a Cup final. I never had the privilege of attending one of these games at the National Stadium, and television coverage was often not guaranteed. Instead, my ears would be glued to our radio, listening to the play-by-play commentary provided by the legendary Khoda Box Mridha. This was of course before the success of the National Cricket Team, which would propel Cricket into the national consciousness as the number one sport in the country. With success came the riches, and the Bangladesh Cricket Board soon became the wealthiest sports federation in the country, while Football on the other hand started to slink back to the dark ages, with lack of funds preventing proper investments in grassroots programs and overall infrastructures. A once proud South Asian footballing nation, Bangladesh would often give perennial favourites India a good run for their money. However, decades of mismanagement meant that the 8th most populous country in the world would fall behind tiny nations like Bhutan and The Maldives.

But Football and Cricket are different beasts. While the game of Cricket is typically played between nations, Football is more club oriented, aside from the big tournaments like the World Cup and the European Championship which comes around once every four years. In the meantime, you have a year-round dose of the glitzy English Premier League and the ultimate competition in club football the Champions League. When I would visit my friends to work on a school project, I would typically catch them watching an Arsenal vs Manchester United game, rather than a South Africa vs Australia cricket match. Whatever the state of the game might have been in the country, the passion for Football was well and truly alive in bedrooms across the nation. For every Bangladesh Cricket jersey on the street, you were likely to see five Real Madrid shirts.

When your native country is regularly ranked between 150th-200th in the world, you seek to attach yourself to a more established footballing nation. For some reason, the history behind which I have not researched, Bangladeshis associated themselves with the two South American superpowers, Argentina and Brazil. Bangladesh was the land of Pelé. Bangladesh was the land of Maradona. And every four years, half the country would be painted blue and white, and the other half resplendent in yellow, blue and green.

While ninety percent of the country (including every single person in my immediate and extended family) danced to the tune of either Samba or Tango, I fell in the tiny minority of the population who threw their support behind a slew of assorted European nations. The earliest memory I have of watching the World Cup is Italia 1990, when the Lothar Matthäus led German team lifted the Jules Rimet Trophy. Thus, began a life-long love affair with Die Mannschaft. I was hooked. I zealously started reading about the history of this great footballing nation, Gerd Müller’s poster would soon adorn my bedroom wall. I watched every old game tape I could get my hands on, and never missed another game going forward, be it friendly or competitive. Just as I was starting to get old enough to have meaningful discussions on the sport, Brazil won their fourth World Cup in 1994. This would be the beginning of a frustrating 20-year journey.

In between classes, after the current teacher’s departure and the arrival of the next; in between punishing cricket drills under the thirty-five degree Dhaka sun; there would always be just enough time to have an animated discussion about Football. Who was the best striker at the moment? Which goalkeeper would you pick in your team? What formation do you prefer? Etcetera. But it would always end with one question, which country is the best? And inevitably, after exhausting every single logic, after dotting all the I’s and crossing all the T’s, the argument would end with the kid in the yellow shirt going, “Yeah whatever, who has the most World Cups? Thought so.” Drop Mic. Exit stage. Every single time. Every single goddamn time.

Oh, how I longed for Die Mannschaft to meet the Canarinho’s on the football pitch. To beat them. My yet young foolish heart dismissive of any other result. Even though I knew when I would go back to those kids to brag about it, their terse reply would be “Who cares, we still have more World Cups.” Then 2002 came as a Godsend. Now battle hardened and in my mid-teens, the moment I had been waiting for had finally arrived. The itch would finally be scratched. Years of festering irritation would finally be scrubbed clean. This was supposed to be THE moment. Remarkably, for two World Cup power houses with the most semifinal appearances and the most matches played in the tournament, this was the first time they would meet in the World Cup. That too in a final! If ever the expression kill two birds with one stone was applicable, this was it. Sure, the Seleçãos had Il Fenomeno, the greatest goal scorer in World Cup history. But we had Der Titan the best player of the tournament!

Nietzsche said man is the cruelest animal. Under the Yokohama sky, Il Fenomeno proved to be the cruelest animal in the world…to me. Sometimes when life gives you lemons, lemonade is just not good enough. Sometimes when life gives you lemons, you have to grab the salt and tequila.

We shall overcome, we shall overcome, we shall overcome some day.

July 8, 2014. Estádio Mineirão, Belo Horizonte. The Red Wedding.

Twelve years after that night in Yokohama we’d get another Dance of the Dragons, this time, on Brazilian soil. Almost all pundits, experts, commentators, statistician, odds makers had Brazil beating Germany in their semi-final clash of the 2014 World Cup. Some of them, vomited out ridiculous odds citing home field advantage, the fact that Germany had never beaten Brazil in a competitive match and the fact that Brazil hadn’t lost a competitive match on home soil since 1975. After all, this was Brazil’s destiny they said, the sole reason she wanted to host the event again was to bury the ghost of their 1950 final defeat by Uruguay at the Maracanã, the only other time Brazil had hosted the tournament. This was supposed to atone for that defeat which entered Brazilian culture as the “Maracanãzo (the tragedy of the Maracanã).” What everyone conveniently chose to ignore was the fact that Germany had made the semi-finals or better in 12 of the last 16 World Cups. That Brazil was an utterly shitty team who conceded the tournament opener on an own goal, needed some officiating favours to salvage its dignity against Croatia, was saved by the woodwork (twice) against a superior Chile side in the last 16 and in the quarterfinals, took tactical fouling to a new level to get past Columbia.

And oh, Brazil would also be missing their best player in Neymar (injured) and their captain Thiago Silva (suspended). But nobody cared of course, because everyone was running on a high octane mix of emotion and energy, of hype and hysteria, fueled by a fan base whipped into frenzy by a media dreaming of the ultimate glory. But, this would be the day, when the chickens would come home to the roost, the day when the world would see that the Emperor had no clothes.

As the pre-match warmups started, the difference was evident. One team kicked a lot, practicing their football with a rugged bluster. The other team played with a fluid and flowing artistry. Can you guess which team did which? In 2014, the answer wasn’t what it used to be. For what it’s worth, Brazil had the most expensive team, with a squad worth over $700 million. A good portion of this was made up by the recent transfer of David Luiz from Chelsea to Paris Saint-Germain for a fee of £50 million, a world-record transfer for a defender. In a bizarre show of support, thousands of cardboard Neymar masks were handed out to fans, the whole team came into the stadium wearing baseball caps with Força Neymar written on them, and during the raucous rendition of the national anthem, stand-in-captain David Luiz and goalkeeper Julio Cesar held up a jersey of Neymar. It was all very touching indeed and by the way Julio Cesar was the first active MLS player to participate in a World Cup semifinal, therefore a special shout out to my hometown team of Toronto FC! The referee was to be Marco Rodriguez. Yes, the same guy whose nickname is the Mexican Dracula. The same guy who failed to spot Luis Suarez’s bite on Giorgio Chiellini. You just couldn’t make this stuff up. For all the pre-match Neymar hullabaloo, the host nation foolishly didn’t have the courtesy to extend Real Madrid and Argentina legend Alfredo Di Stéfano a minute’s silence before kick-off. The famous Argentinian had passed away the day before, and after half an hour, was surely sniggering away up in the heavens, laughing at how well his divine retribution had worked.

With every passing second, the home supporters seemed more and more like hostages. Millions across Brazil were in dazed, damp-eyed disbelief. Brazil was having a meltdown, and the entire world was watching. Die Mannschaft was handing down a beat down of a lifetime, a beat down that will echo through the generations. 5–0 after 30 mins of play. Cinco bloody Cero. To say records were tumbling would be an understatement. Perhaps symbolically the most important one was when Miroslav Klose surpassed Il Fenomeno to become the greatest goal scorer in World Cup history, in his own motherland. Hulk was in the starting XI for the home side, but alas they needed more Avengers than that. Apparently as all of this was going on, a thunderstorm had struck the ESPN main studio, it was truly Armageddon in Belo Horizonte. At half-time, the players trudged off the field on the verge of tears; their fans however, were unable to show such restraint. It was hard to say what would have hurt the most, losing in the final, or seeing Germany stop trying too hard because it was too embarrassing. If this were a Brazilian churrascaria, one might have expected Germany to turn the stone over to the red side, signifying that their appetite was sated.

No más! No más!

For all the energy spent on celebrating the memory of Neymar, the player whose presence was clearly felt the most was Thiago Silva. Without their captain manning the defensive lines, the Seleçãos abandoned the ship at the first sign of danger, and without Silva, there was no one to yell at David Luiz and make sure he wasn’t being…well, David Luiz. As the newly minted £50 million central defender kept on charging into the offensive zone without any definite plan or purpose, at one point he threw a body check at Thomas Müller then lectured him for having the temerity to go down. This, with the score now on 6–0. Brilliant. I guess in a way you could argue that the team paid a beautiful tribute to Neymar. Neymar couldn’t play, so neither did the rest of the team. Dante, who replaced Thiago Silva in the lineup must have felt that he was in all nine circles of hell simultaneously by the time Schürrle thumped in the seventh goal. As a member of the historic treble winning Bayern Munich team only a year ago, he must have been used to being on the right side of the ledger most of the time, but unfortunately in this game, most of his club mates were on the opposite side of the pitch.

The great Spanish side, perhaps the best of all time, won the 2010 World Cup scoring eight total goals. By the time the curtains came down in Estádio Mineirão, Germany had scored seven in a single game against the mighty Brazil in Brazil. Even Apollo Creed had put up a better fight against Drago. In all my days of watching and reading about sports, I can’t think of very many other occasions, where the score-line ended up being this one-sided in a game of such magnitude. The one that promptly comes to mind is the 1940 NFL Championship, where the Bears pulverized the Redskins 73–0, on the road no less. This was Brazil’s worst defeat in 94 years. Neymar and his colleagues shared a combined 533 shots on Instagram during the tournament. Maybe if they approached their game with a similar vigor they would have mustered more than the 112 shots they managed during their seven World Cup matches.

The post-game headlines wrote themselves: “Brazilians waxed!” Brazil did not deserve to be on the same field as Germany. Home-field advantage was the only thing that allowed them to make the semifinals, and it wasn’t anywhere close to enough to save them against the Germans. Germany was not particularly brilliant; they didn’t have to be. But they were good, of that make no mistake. Their relentlessness as they powered on to get to the final tally of seven had a terrible beauty about it, the total subjugation of an opponent who, before the match, seemed to think it had the divine right to be in the final. This was not just a humiliation, a beating, a complete and utter demolition job. It was the ritual disemboweling of a team, the deconstruction not just of a squad of footballers, but of a nation’s hopes and dreams.

After almost two decades of losing my voice in frustrating arguments about why Germany and Brazil were on opposite trajectories to success, about how the Germans simply had more talent than Brazil, about how Germany was simply better than Brazil, I finally had some tangible evidence to point to. It’s not 1970 Brazilian fans, your glory days are over. In the 24 months since Brazil’s World Cup degradation, there have been growing calls for the national game to undergo a “Germanification”. A group of Brazilian businessmen asked Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich whether they’d be interested in bringing their academies to Brazil; they refused. The Brazilian Football Federation contacted Double Pass, a Belgian football consultancy firm credited with revolutionizing German youth football, while clubs like Atlético Paranaense have hired companies like EXOS who advises the German national team on training and nutrition. Such is the new-found respect for the German game that players in the Brasileiro are now being renamed after Joachim Löw’s heroes. Flamengo’s Jonas is known as “Schweinsteiger do Nordeste (the Schweinsteiger of the Northeast)”. Ceará’s Uillian Correia is now “Uillian Kroosreia”. Nobody was referring to Ronaldinho as the “buck-toothed Jeremies”. Times have certainly changed.

I know when I go back to argue with my friends who are Brazil fans, they will have the same closing remark. Who has more World Cups? Fair enough. But now, I can pass them a 7-UP and say “Drink up boys!’. Mic drop. Exit stage. For July 8, 2014, will never, ever, be forgot.

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