First off, don’t be misled by the scoreline. The history books will say that Brazil lost to Germany 7-1, true. But that one goal was scored in injury time at the end of the match, long after the Brazillian humiliation was complete. In every other way that matters, Germany defeated Brazil by seven goals yesterday, more goals than Brazil had given up in an entire World Cup since 1998, the first defeat on home soil since 1975, the biggest margin of loss for the national team in ninety-four years.
What is this like? I don’t think people in this country really grasp what it means to be down 5-0 after thirty minutes. You could compare it to a hockey team up 5-0 after one period, or maybe the Super Bowl defenestrations of the Broncos against the Redskins or Niners in 1988 and 1990 respectively. But to really grasp what it’s like, imagine the new college football playoff, with an undefeated Alabama team hosting, say, Nebraska. And imagine Nebraska going up 35-0 through the first quarter and ultimately winning by a final of 84-3, with the final pathetic field goal for Alabama coming as time expires in the 4th quarter on the last play of the game. And oh, by the way, Auburn is playing in the other semifinal and could win a championship instead.
That’s what happened. The team with more World Cups than any other, the host nation of the 2014 tournament, the nation synonymous with the sport – that team was absolutely destroyed, utterly humiliated before a worldwide audience behind a team that couldn’t miss. This wasn’t a match, it was an autopsy. This was the biggest disaster for Brazil since Google announced that Orkut was shutting down.
I mean…I don’t know what you do for a loss like that. The coach is fired, for sure. The players will live with this for the rest of their lives – Tim Vickery, the BBC’s South American football specialist, said on the World Service this morning that he had known players from the 1950 Brazil team that still lived with the pain of the loss to Uruguay half a century on. Right now, the whole country is shellshocked or blackout drunk. When they come to, it’s not going to be pretty…especially in a country where the tournament – and a presumed victory – was supposed to salve growing unrest over economic inequality and political corruption. Elections have been lost over less.
It was amazing to watch. It’s not often you get to see one of the superpowers of sport systematically destroyed in real time in front of two billion people and all of Twitter. And along the way, it drove home what a great job ESPN has done with the World Cup as a whole: get the best announcers, get good analysts (including not only foreign players but Julie Foudy – can you imagine somebody bringing in a former WNBA all-star to comment on the NBA finals?) and let the game tell the story, instead of loading it down with hype and analysts and the kind of human-interest folderol that makes the Super Bowl and Olympics unwatchable. ESPN does so much wrong, but they’ve done this absolute right, and I suspect we’re really going to miss them in four years.