The world’s most
decorated football nation waited 64 years to erase a nightmare.
Instead, a worse
one came.
It has been said it
could never get as bad for Brazil as the Maracanazo, the nation’s
famous loss to Uruguay in the 1950 World Cup Final in Rio.
That was carnival
recast into funeral, when 400,000 horrified eyes looked on as a haunting blur
of sky blue rendered their heavily-favored heroes powerless.
It was the
unthinkable happening to the invincible.
It was like
watching one’s own home being robbed during a party.
And, while the five
World Cup triumphs that followed for the Seleção certainly
displaced the prominence of that memory, it would be disingenuous to say that
the historical mosaic of futebol in Brazil has altogether discarded that
recurring fever dream of so many years ago.
Whether the
goalkeeper Barbosa’s infamous blunder — which has long been blamed for the loss
— was heard in the stadium or through staticky radio waves or via trembling
voices or quivering hands or lines of print on a page years later, it is a
story whose legacy lives on and that no Brazilian of any generation since has
forgotten.
If anything, the Maracanazo's
influence and significance is more alive this year, as the country hosts the
World Cup for the first time since 1950, than at any moment in recent history.
Yet, while every
Brazilian grew up hearing the legend, the vast majority of the country never
knew anything of the taste, the smell, the sight of that kind of
disappointment. After all, this is a nation that hadn’t lost a competitive
match on home soil since 1975.
Until today.
Today, the ghost
story these players had long been spoon-fed as children became a harsh,
inescapable reality.
Only this wasn’t
quite the same.
This wasn’t a
glorious battle in a final — one that hinged on singular moments of legendary
brilliance and brief, cruel individual failure. This didn’t have an
electrifying second-half comeback or a late-match surge for an equalizer or an
unfancied underdog. This didn’t even have a trophy.
Aristotle wrote of
“the catharsis of pity and fear in tragedy.” The Maracanazo had
that catharsis. On this day, however, the tragedy unfolded in particularly
anti-climatic terms.
It was over early
and profoundly disappointing, lusterless, and deflating for most of the match.
Old Aristotle would
think it quite a bad play — and the Brazilians, and many of us, would be
inclined to agree on the basis of footballing quality.
It was, however,
historic.
Within 29 minutes,
Germany had not just ruined a World Cup dream, they had throttled it dead. With
five goals in the space of 18 minutes — that felt to everyone else like three,
but to the Brazilians like an eternity — Die Mannschaft put
the game to bed. With so long to play, they were branded with the timeworn tag
of being “efficient.”
Of course, the
Germans were efficient — machinelike, even. But, these were
glorious mechanics at play.
Exemplary
engineering can be both weird and beautiful to look at — and this had elements
of both. The Germans are a dynamic, attractive, experimental (and, yes, okay, efficient)
marvel with an elusive soul — and their dominance deserves proper respect and
context beyond a narrative of Brazilian heartbreak. They aren’t just a machine
— they are parts of the Newcomen Engine, grandfather clock, and Large Hadron
Collider all rolled into one. They are devastatingly brilliant, diverse, and
difficult to understand in any simple terms.
But, that
discussion can come at another time. Today is about Brazil.
It is about a team
with unimaginable pressure on its shoulders, trying desperately to paper over
its cracks, stitch together its broken seams, and survive without its best
player and spiritual leader — a team that came undone in desperate fashion.
It is about a
nation that has endured so much to get to this point, that has been forcibly
bent over backwards, forwards, and sideways to host a party whose mortifying
expense was shamelessly demanded by its guests, FIFA — a country that was then
forced to watch this.
And it is about
football, the game we all love — the game that the Brazilians love the best —
which can at once be endlessly cruel and endlessly fair, heart-rending and
heart-pumping, a dream and a nightmare.
Today’s game was
all of those things to the neutral, but it was only a disaster in Brazil.
Eventually, though,
this will be yet another Maracanazo.
It will sting and
hurt and take its toll.
But, then, as the
years roll on, it will become an old ghost story that generations pass down —
first with pain, then with disbelief, then with fascination.
It will be an event
that, like the name Barbosa, is eventually spoken in a whisper instead of a
yell — an event that will one day fade, and influence, and be folded neatly
into a long history of successes and failures.
And, knowing
Brazil, there will be a lot more of the former than the latter in the years to
come.
They are a nation
that hadn’t won a World Cup before the Maracanazo, but lifted
five trophies in the 13 tournaments that followed.
That Brazil’s
greatest successes were born out of its darkest hour will perhaps offer some
small solace — even on nights like these, when all seems so lost and
bleak.
838.3 million (US$14 million).
