Brazil have been an accident waiting to happen for this entire tournament - this is less than schoolboy defending.
Lost: one national football team, not seen since 21:00 this evening. Wearing yellow shirts. If found, please send them home. How's it in Koln tonight, Cologne?
6-0 I think I've sussed why Brazil are so bad - Bernard, Oscar, Fred, Jo... and they've even got a Victor and a Maxwell on the bench. Must be England in disguise.
For a country with so much poverty trying to live a dream, how bad to have the millionaire players let them down.
Brazil's only save grace is that it wasn't Argentina who beat them 7-1! Now that would hurt even more. Just couldn't believe how easy it was for the Germans. You don't let any team walk through your defence that easily - let alone one full of top class players (does Alan Hansen still think Germany aren't that great?)
They would do better crying over their living standards, their favellas, the corruption of their politicians, the rape of the Amazonian rainforest rather than football. But I guess (to twist an old saying) football is the opium of the Brazilian masses - it enables them to forget.
That's why the Brasilians were protesting before the World Cup. The money spent pandering to the FIFA, the FIFA people and being robbed by the local organisers could have done so much for the country. The nation doesn't need the World Cup and it certainly doesn't need the Olympic Games, these are vast ego massaging exercises for the people who run the country. The president, Dilma Rousseff, is only in power as she was the chosen successor of Lula and people liked him, even though his legacy is proving to be incredibly fragile, but she is proving to be hugely unpopular. Personally, I sincerely hope she is not re-elected. If the country were to change its motto from Ordem e Progresso the new one would have to be "Make do and mend", except the powerful have spirited most of the resources away.
This applies to many other countries as well. Unfortunately Karl Marx did not live at the same time as the World Cup, otherwise he would have coined a phrase for this phenomenon. When you see whole countries like Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia etc. turning 11 men running around after a ball into a matter of national shame or honour, then the whole original ethos of international sport (friendship between nations etc.) is dead. Unfortunately this is not confined to the third world either. When you wake up to headlines such as 'Jetzt hauen wir die Brasilianer weg', it becomes clear that the World Cup has become a catalyst for nationalism in countries which have an unexplainable desire for international recognition. I can't remember who said this but I believe it to to be very true - 'happy is the land which has no need for national heroes` eg. Switzerland ie. not World Champions in anything and not particularly worried about it.
Brecht, The life of Galileo... Galileo: No, Andrea: Unhappy is the land that needs a hero. The curse of society...... place the praise and blame on another ... from hero to villain..... We know a lot about this social phenomenon in the UK
