Der Perfekte Sturm
By Mark Daniell
11/07/2014
Just what is the third-fourth place playoff? How come we have it in this tournament, but not in the Champions League? Or in other events like Wimbledon? My hunch (and even though I have Google at my fingertips, I’m going to stick with a hunch) is that it’s down to the fact that the World Cup started off as a progression of Olympic football, in which they will have needed a way to work out who won bronze. If that’s the case then you could use the match as hard evidence supporting Uruguay’s claim that their 1924 and 1928 Olympic gold medals are akin to world titles and entitle them to wear the four stars they have on their shirt. (They really do have four stars on there...) But I’m not about to defend the Uruguayans, not just yet.
And yet, understand it or not, we have a playoff anyway, and even though Van ‘King of the’ Gall says it makes him sick to the stomach you just know it’s going to be a humdinger of a match! World Cup goals are a rare commodity, and any footballer wants them on his CV. Huntelaar might enjoy a full game, Dirky Kuyt deserves a spell up front and Robben is still in the running for golden boot. Also, I think we can safely assume Brazil will want to win this one too, so we might just be lucky and see the antithesis to the semi finals: a game that is both a good contest and an open, attacking one.
So, while we you head off to Google the odds on Robben to get a hat-trick, let’s have a cautionary look at what exactly happened to Brazil…
Now if you’ve read this far you’ll know by now that I’m no expert in these things, but it seems to me that Brazil were caught in the middle of the perfect storm. And I’m not talking about any CGI wave, Nespresso-sipping fisherman storm either, I’m talking a footballing fracas so gnarly that even the Germans were grimacing.
Ingredient 1: Brazil were a fairly shaky team to begin with. Sure, they boasted a couple of excellent players, a huge amount of national support and some glorious self-belief, but as a team they often looked shaky. Sometimes, that’s all you need, and indeed they showed great resilience to muscle past Chile and Colombia. But it was those two gruelling victories that took their toll and meant Brazil went into the semi-final without Thiago Silva or Neymar.
Ingredient 2: At the best of times, losing your best defender and captain is awkward. When misfortune means you lose your best attacking player and chief goal-scorer too, well that can be considered even more awkward. And when you discover that you don’t have adequate replacements for either of these roles and you’re about to play Germany, it can be considered most awkward, say, about as awkward as writing the word awkward too many times in one awkward sentence. So Scolari did what any other insane football manager would do: he gave the role of Thiago Silva to David Luiz, and he gave the role of Neymar to David Luiz. Now I’ve been thinking about this and I can’t think of an expression that adequately sums up how dangerous that plan is. In fact, I think it sets a new benchmark for dangerous plans and in future, when presented with a dangerous plan, like, say, free-climbing the Burj Khalifa with soapy hands, or expecting a toddler to know what to do with a fondue fork and some piping hot cheese, people will say “uh oh, that’s like playing David Luiz at centre back and up front at the same time.”
Ingredient 3: The final ingredient in the perfect storm was that Brazil decided to carry out this David Luiz experiment against the most well drilled counter-attacking side in the tournament: a team which couldn’t break down a solid defensive unit like Algeria, but would joyfully dismantled anything with holes at the back, like a 10 man Portugal, for example. By playing the previously unknown brand of full-back-attack football, Brazil unwittingly opened themselves up to Der Perfekte Sturm… (I know, I know, it sounds like a kid winging it at GCSE, but that’s what it says on Google translate).
Of course, the sheer scale of the annihilation was exacerbated by the fact that about ten of the Brazilians got upset, stopped playing for seven minutes and let in four goals. But we’ve all been there. It’s why children smash tennis rackets on the floor and why Mulligans were invented. Unfortunately, although somehow accepted in other sports, neither of those policies work in football.
At this point I would like to mention the half time radio commentary delivered by BBC’s Danny Mills and Tim Vickery. Sadly, Vickery didn’t have the opportunity to phonetically pronounce any Latin American names, or mention Brazilian ‘moments’, but that’s okay, because he had a back-up narrative about riots and stabbings that he hadn’t been able to peddle since the start of the World Cup where there had been no stabbings or riots. Do you remember him harping on about the threat of stabbings and riots back in June, in a sort of watch this space tone? It was as if he wanted it to happen, just so that he could say he’d called it first. Now, every time I hear Tim Vickery’s dark foreboding “I’m very worried about the possibility of there being stabbings and riots” I can’t help but picture him, Molotov cocktail and machete in hand, ready to kick shit off in Fortaleza.
Danny ‘Any Given Sunday’ Mills meanwhile revealed that his half time team talk would be to “pack up and go home. It’s over.” That’s the spirit Danny! Tell it like you smell it!
Lastly, speaking of Mulligans, did anyone else notice how close Vlaar’s penalty came to miraculous redemption? Check out the bounce after Romero has saved it. That could have been a very different story…