Meditations on defeat after Brazil’s 1-7 loss to Germany

When the Brazil vs Germany World Cup semi-final game ended, it was close to 4 am, and I was wide awake, dazed and confused. In the course of about ten minutes in the first half-hour, an idea had been tossed aside and shredded like confetti.

For more than a decade, we had sensed that that idea, a notion about Brazilian football, had been slowly dissipating. It was the idea of football as defined by that alluring midfielder Sócrates: “Beauty comes first. Victory is secondary. What matters is joy.” Over the years, we watched Brazil, looking for snatches of their creativity, for expressions of artistry and finesse even when cramped by tight spaces and their opponents’ greater physicality. On Tuesday, all that unravelled at a speed that made us giddy, even nauseous. I tried to distract myself from what had just taken place, but Cupcake Wars, playing on another channel, didn’t stand a chance.

A generation—mine—of Indians became football-watchers seduced by the Brazil of 1982. The first World Cup I saw on television turned into a magical mystery tour when these men in gold—Zico, Sócrates, Falcao, Oscar, Júnior, Éder—materialised on Indian screens. Brazil didn’t win that World Cup, but who cared. The football they played established the legend, which lasted until a few days ago. From 1982, we went backwards in time to discover the lustre of Brazil’s footballing history and legend. Going forwards, we stayed absurdly loyal. It was like being drawn, illogically, persistently, to an old flame.

At this World Cup, even with Neymar, the Seleçäo were never convincing, and still we hoped. When Brazil internally combusted on Tuesday in the city of Belo Horizonte, (rough translation: “beautiful horizon”), we were forced to accept the truth: what we had been gazing wistfully at from a distance was merely a mirage.

The first step to climbing out of the gloom is to ask what sporting misery from the past could possibly compare to this. It’s one way of trying to give some shape and context to what we’ve witnessed and to find some order in the chaos.

My friends have been scrabbling through their memories. One remembered Marat Safin taking apart Pete Sampras in the 2000 US Open final. Another, the 91 seconds it took Mike Tyson to knock out Michael Spinks in 1988. A younger colleague thought of the 2003 World Cup cricket final, in which Australia beat India by 125 runs. The whole of China will surely forever feel the twinge of Liu Xiang pulling up injured in the 110m heats at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

My personal gloomsday belongs to another 7-1, from 32 years ago. Or, more accurately, from the Indian perspective, the 1-7 of the India vs Pakistan hockey final of the 1982 Asian Games. On television a few hours later, the writer and commentator Novy Kapadia said that the 1982 defeat marked the moment Indian hockey went downhill. But did it really? Another hockey watcher recalled India’s 1-6 defeat to Australia on the AstroTurf of the 1976 Olympics—the first time the Olympics were played on an artificial surface—as the sport’s grim watershed moment. Maybe much like the gradation of athletic “greatness,” our rankings of sporting nadirs also depend largely on what our youthful memories cling to.

No doubt when the history of Indian hockey is written, the advent of AstroTurf will be marked as the tipping point of the sport’s tailspin in the country. And the defeat to Australia does mark Year Zero. But Montreal, where that game was played, was all too far away and there was no live television, neither sport nor news. The impact of the defeat was heard and understood rather than seen and felt—it stirred the brain rather than hit the gut.

The defeat to Pakistan, however, in front of a raucously supportive home audience in 1982, broadcast live on Doordarshan, led to a domino effect on Indian hockey. It brutally flattened the legacies of those men who played on the Indian team. Over time, there was a steady corrosion of the public perception of the national team and where it stood in the world game. The magic of the wizards was gradually rendered irrelevant.

To understand what happened on Tuesday night in Brazil, magnify this about a thousand-fold and place it on fast forward. Brazilian papers the next day struggled for words to describe the loss. The country’s last comparably traumatic defeat was the 2-1 in the 1950 World Cup, against Uruguay in the final group stage at the Maracana in Rio de Janeiro, when all Brazil needed was a draw to win the World Cup. The defeat that followed led to the game being called “Maracanazo”— roughly, “the Maracana blow.” The playwright Nelson Rodrigues termed it Brazil’s “Hiroshima.” Now, the Maracanazo has been replaced by the “Mineirazo,” after Estadio Mineirao, the venue of the ill-fated 8 July game, now destined to be the country’s most ghoulish footballing memory.

Brazilian football and Indian hockey, it must be said, share relatively few parallels. To start with, their contemporary nadirs are separated by decades. Between New Delhi 1982 and Mineirao 2014, all of sport has taken transformative leaps in training and technology, communications and economic scale. The images, stakes and reactions to a defeat like this are today unimaginably greater. Even more significantly, unlike with Indian hockey in the 1970s and 1980s, which existed alongside cricket, there are no other sports to rival football’s popularity in Brazil, despite the many successes of the country’s volleyball teams.

Both sports are linked in their followers’ consciousness by numbers: five World Cups for Brazil and eight Olympic golds for India. But Brazil’s football stands out for the sheer range and scale of its global appeal. An intersection in my Bangalore neighbourhood of Gowthamapuram contains four statues: Buddha, Mother Teresa, BR Ambedkar and Pele. Gowthamapuram was always football territory, well before globalisation, 24-hour television, the internet, social media and T-shirt merchandising. And Pele was always its hero.

Whatever the distance between Brazilian football and Indian hockey, they are nevertheless linked by a very simple truth, revealed in a casual throwaway line from an academic friend. “The narratives of victory and defeat,” he said, “are usually the same everywhere.” That could spell doom for us sports journalists, who try to convince our bosses that we have unique interpretations of events, when actually the same events and interpretations have taken place several years ago, in other countries, over and over again.

Like the fall of dynasties. No dynasty ever predicts its fall, particularly not sporting dynasties propped up a firm belief in their own publicity. Professional boxing, Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, all represent a rapid decline in different ways. No matter the characters, a certain combination of factors never fades: bad administration, bickering, lack of foresight, delusion, complacency, entitlement, arrogance.

Somewhere amongst these are also the answers to why there has been an erosion of Brazilian football since its headiest days. What should make Brazil sweat about its performance, not merely on semi-finals night but all through the tournament, is the paucity of the options on offer. The team stuttered along driven by the occasion, a shrinking group of exceptional players, and the support of the crowd.

At home, Indian hockey couldn’t stop itself from freefall because it had entrenched adminstrators, a victim complex about the arrival of AstroTurf and not enough professional club structures elsewhere that could keep its talent pool bubbling over. The Indian team has never made it to a semi-final of the World Cup after winning it in 1975, nor the Olympics, since its gold in 1980. The debates about the “brand” of hockey India should play, how can it possibly catch up with the faster, more physical “European” game, continue unresolved.

Unlike Indian hockey, Brazilian football is an engine room that moves a conveyor belt, which year after year produces a steady supply of players for professional leagues around the world. The football World Cup, then, becomes a snapshot of what this engine is able to turn out in terms of quality. And at the moment, Brazil, too, is asking itself existential questions. The writer Rob Hughes summarised this dilemma in a 10 July New York Times piece, where he wrote of “the loss of Brazil’s soccer-playing soul” since the 1960s, when “Brazilian coaches went abroad to study a new way to withstand the physical power of European soccer.” “From there on, Jogo Bonito (literally pretty play) was gradually sacrificed,” Hughes wrote.

The narratives of victory and defeat are indeed the same everywhere. Four years down the line, we will know whether Brazil can rekindle its instinctive excellence, which bewitched the world. Never mind the titles—that will be a sign that Brazil has recovered.