It
is with great sense of pain that hosts Brazil and the Netherlands file
out today to play the third-place match in the 2014 World Cup. The few
Brazilians who spoke with The PUNCH say they are no longer interested in the competition as a third-place win is just the same as a fourth-place finish.
They argue that winning on Saturday can
never be like winning the trophy itself on Sunday or least participating
in the final game.
Indeed their sentiment was deeply expressed by Louis van Gaal after his team lost to Argentina in Wednesday’s semi-final match.
Facing the world press on Wednesday,
Holland’s van Gaal lashed out at the third-place match billed for
Brasilia. The Dutch manager believes the match should have been scrapped
so many years ago.
He said, “I think this match should
never be played. I’ve been saying this for 10 years. But we’ll just have
to play this match.”
He said that the match condemns the
losers to finish a tournament after another defeat, and that one side
always has an extra day’s rest.
“It’s unfair also because we have one
less day to recover, so that’s not fair play. But the worst thing is
that chances are you lose twice in a row.
“And after a tournament in which you’ve
played so marvellously well, you’d go home as a loser just because
you’ve lost the last two matches.
“This has got nothing whatsoever to do
with sport. But I said this 15 years ago. You shouldn’t have players
play a match for third or fourth place, because there’s only one prize
that counts and that’s becoming champion.”
It is very difficult to say which team
would win the match in Brasilia. The players of both sides are still in
shock and pain. No expert has been able to explain what happened with
the usually fantastic Brazil against Germany.
But their coach Luiz Felipe Scolari has
urged his players and his country to move on from that devastating
defeat he called “astonishing” on Tuesday.
The humiliation brought on a nation by
the 7-1 defeat is still fresh but Scolari insists they have to move on
and recover quickly.
He started this way, “I know my career
will be marked by this defeat but we have an obligation to move on,
thinking about the next goal, which in this case is the match for third
place in Brasilia.
“I know it’s a much smaller dream than
we all wanted but we have to honour the shirt of the national team. The
tournament was not all bad. We had a bad defeat.”
Scolari’s future is still not clear. But
many journalists in Brazil for the World Cup believe that he will
likely resign after the game today or be asked to go. Nobody is certain
for now except the man and the Brazilian federation.
On that he said, “We (coaching staff)
have a deal with the CBF (Brazilian Football Confederation) until the
game on Saturday and after that, probably, we will have a conversation
to sort some things out.
“After the World Cup, we will submit a
report to the board of the CBF where you will see the good and the bad
that we did and then it depends on the direction.
“There is nothing going through my head
right now. I will continue with my life, the players will also continue
to be winners and we must continue – you cannot end the life of the
players for it.
“History will have to record that Brazil, for the first time since 2002, reached the semi-finals.”
His future may not be certain but what
the fans of football across the world know is that the match in Brasilia
will not attract the kind of excitement like the first round matches.
It is also certain that fans of both countries may not be as
enthusiastic as they were when the competition kicked off on June 12.
But whichever way they feel, there is a room for the game in the
fixtures and it just has to be played anyway.
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