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Germany’s annihilation of Brazil finally put paid to the myth of Jogo Bonito. Brazil has been a mediocre football team for years, and their semi-final capitulation showed just how far behind they’ve fallen.
Perhaps it’s easy to say in hindsight, but surely any reasonable football fan could see that such a thrashing was on the cards.
When your last line of defence is the utterly hapless David Luiz, you’re always going to struggle.
But what made Germany’s 7-1 thrashing all the more humiliating is the fact that it so brutally exposed Brazil’s ignorance of international football standards.
Australian fans should be familiar with the sentiment – it was evident as long as eight years ago when the Socceroos played the Selecao off the park in a desperately unlucky 2-0 defeat in Munich.
Filing out of the Allianz Arena that day, what was most telling about the performance was the way the Brazilian players and fans celebrated.
Despite labouring to what was supposed to be a routine victory, Brazil and its oddly boorish supporters celebrated as if they’d just won the World Cup.
They were then predictably dispatched by a vastly superior France and exited at the quarter-final stage again in 2010, when this time the Dutch proved their undoing.
And the whole time they’ve played dour, uninspiring football as their attempted means to an end.
It says much that one of Brazil’s most relied-upon players during this period of stagnation was hulking defender Lucio, who won over 100 caps between 2000 and 2011, while former Arsenal stalwart Gilberto Silva racked up more than 90.
No surprise then that Brazil’s latest skipper is centre-back Thiago Silva, while coach Luiz Felipe Scolari likewise leans heavily on the defensive midfield exploits of Luis Gustavo, Fernandinho and Paulinho.
In other words, genuine attacking talent such as Neymar is decidedly thin on the ground, and when the team’s striking options include Fred and Jo, it’s really not hard to see why.
How did it come to this? Surely one of the biggest problems is Brazil’s own misguided belief it has some sort of divine right to play beautiful football.
If any team epitomises Jogo Bonito, it’s Germany. Yet Germany’s free-flowing, aggressive football didn’t happen by chance – it’s the result of pouring time and money and resources into developing talent from a young age.
If this World Cup proves anything, it’s that the Bundesliga truly is the finest domestic competition in Europe, with only six of the current German squad plying their trade overseas – including record-breaking Lazio goal-poacher Miroslav Klose.
And with the German side possessing not only the best goalkeeper in the world right now, but also attacking talent like Thomas Müller, Toni Kroos, Mario Götze and Mesut Özil, it’s no surprise they were so easily able to overpower a dysfunctional Brazilian outfit.
They should steam-roll Argentina in the final too, unless one man in particular can produce the game of his life.
Indeed if football is a team game, as the saying goes, then Germany should win the 2014 World Cup final at a canter.
Yet the mercurial Lionel Messi has shown glimpses throughout the knock-out stage that he’s about to spark into life.
Can Messi fire Argentina to a World Cup win on South American soil? He should offer a far sterner test to the German defence than Brazil’s goal-shy attack, at any rate.
But it’s hard to imagine the Germans’ confidence is anything but sky-high, after a thrashing so comprehensive it destroyed a long-standing myth.
Brazilian football is racked with internal problems – from its mismanaged domestic calendar to its questionable treatment of young talent and the channelling of funds into the wrong hands.
The Selecao haven’t played anything close to beautiful football for years.
And after suffering one of the most demoralising defeats in recent history, they’ll need years of rebuilding if they are ever to do so again.