Brazil: The Mineirazo
The first goal took twenty-three minutes. The second took eleven minutes more. Then three in six minutes. Then a sixth before half-time. Brazil, hosts, the nation most identified with football's beauty and ambition, stood in the Estádio Mineirão in Belo Horizonte and watched Thomas Müller and Miroslav Klose and Toni Kroos and Sami Khedira dismantle the structure they had spent four years preparing. The crowd went quiet before halftime. Some began weeping. By the final whistle — Germany 7, Brazil 1, a scoreline that the BBC's text graphics initially refused to publish because it looked like a data error — the silence in the Mineirão had the quality of collective trauma rather than sporting disappointment.
Germany's performance was not simply good; it was clinical in the precise sense — the surgical removal of weakness with minimal excess effort. Brazil without Neymar and without the suspended captain Thiago Silva had no defensive anchor and no creative outlet, and Germany identified both absences within the first fifteen minutes and exploited them with a speed that left television analysts unable to do anything except repeat the score as it changed. Kroos scored twice in two minutes. Klose became the all-time World Cup top scorer. Schürrle came on and scored twice more.
The final in the Maracanã between Germany and Argentina was almost an afterthought, and yet it produced the correct result and a moment of appropriate intensity. Götze, the twenty-two-year-old substitute introduced specifically to change the game, controlled a Schürrle cross on his chest and volleyed it across Romero in the 113th minute. Lionel Messi received the Golden Ball as the tournament's best player and held it without expression. He would return to World Cup finals. He would not win one for another eight years.
The Mineirazo entered the cultural record alongside the Maracanazo as a national football catastrophe. The two events — 1950 and 2014, Uruguay and Germany — are now a pair: the two occasions on which Brazil faced obliteration on home soil and suffered it completely. Football's cruellest teacher, the cliché runs, is defeat. The 2014 semi-final was not teaching; it was an examination for which Brazil had not studied, sat in a stadium named after the very ground of 1950's aftermath, in front of cameras broadcasting to the world.
MATCH FOOTAGE
2014
Brazil 1–7 Germany
2014
Germany 1–0 Argentina (AET)
2014
Germany 2–1 Algeria (AET)