#BRAGER : Another Epoch another Blitz!

It was the night of statistics. For winners and losers. Never before a team was defeated with this score on a World Cup semi final. The Shame of Shames. New world record for Klose with 16 World Cup goals, stolen from Brazilian born Ronaldo. Brazil was never defeated by a foreign team in their own backyard. And it went on and on like this. For hours... The morning papers continued the stats teasers, adding more oil to the fire of South American humiliation...

Every new goal the Germans scored yesterday, the TV reporter dusted off more and more of those old stats. What we had hard time grasping was that this was a simple case of 'history in the making'! We were clueless. Jaws dropped to the floor. Shocked! Flabbergasted! At a given moment, when the goals followed each other literally seconds apart, I thought some scenes were actually 'replays' of the 'previous' goals. I hadn't yet realised those were brand new smashes into Julio's nets. Unglaublich! Brazil fans wished they could ALT-CTRL-DEL and start over again. I'd lost count. 

Imagine you were on the Brazilian side yesterday, when all this was going on. Weeping faces and bitter tears of men, women, and children. A shattered dream. All their chauvinist fire and energy, conspicuous during the singing of their anthem moments earlier, quickly disappeared into oblivion. Few chewed their national colours for snack (see above). In comedian George Lopez's hilarious words... these are not tears of sorrow... these are tears of frustration! Dutch ex-football international Jan Mulder, sitting on a live TV panel and watching the game, empathised: "I feel so sorry for these people... you know, when things like that happen in one of our Euro countries, people say, well, that happens... forgive and forget... let's go to the beach!"

This was one of those events, that years from now we shall be asking each other... "where were you the night Germany shredded the Seleção into nothingness?". It was like 9-11 sort of thing. (BTW, I was in my office in Paris then, and I remember I looked stunned at Paul, my Finance Assistant, when he told me that one of the twin towers had just collapsed!)

After the match, I stayed up for a few more hours, deep into the early morning, enjoying Twitter postings on #BRAGER hashtag. It was laughs and tears all over, together with innuendos of bitchiness and irony. Some very creative postings indeed. One that I thought was very funny was an animated GIF with a cocktail glass filled with yellow-orange based alcohol mix, a slice of orange and lime, and a tiny proud Brazilian flag on a tooth-stick, like those we usually find piercing cocktail party snacks. Strong samba music in the background... Suddenly, out of nowhere, a huge German beer-glass hits the cocktail from above, and hardly any trace of shattered glass or juice left over... samba sounds were muted in microseconds. Cemetery silence! Only leftover beer foam continued to slowly slide down the outer walls of the lager glass, like a bitter Brazilian tear.

Before the smash...

...and after!

Someone else posted: Brazilians have Neymar, the Portugese, Ronaldo, Argentinians got Messi, but... Germans have a team! Where individuals are sacrificed in the interest of the whole group. 'German football prima donna' is an oxymoron! How true! In an interview right after the game, when a reporter asked Klose how he felt about his brand new 16 WC goals record, he responded (!!!) that the team was playing well and that it is their team and the coach that had to be credited for today's achievement, and more of this dry ya-di-da-di-da-da... Humility? Sense of duty? Discipline? Dry humor? What can I say? Emotionless MFs, outstanding sportsmen though, raised and taught to 'serve' with humility. Without any shadow of 'emotional weakness'. The definition of freezing 'cool'! Even the handful naturalised foreigners in their team, Boateng, Oezil, Khedira look over-Germanised! What can you say? Any Latino player achieving Klose's feat and record... OMG, the world wouldn't be big enough to accommodate the ego. Expecting scores of virgin chicas to parade right in front of him and choose to his heart's desire... 

Not Klose though... He even blushed and felt humble at the question, looked everywhere around except the reporter in the eyes, and came up with an answer that anybody, military camp-drilled and brainwashed to the bone, would have come up with. Androids, non-human, responding with scripted answers. Get a life, man! There's more to it than fuessbal! Die Mannschaft... ok, they are plain good... too good to be true yesterday, maybe... yep... but Mein Gott, they are so boring! Like a German colleague once said "German humor is not a laughing matter". How could it?

On the other hand, what happened yesterday also proved my 'theory' about 'emotion' vs. 'discipline' and 'method'. Like Sax K., an ex-colleague, recently wrote me: It's about time someone teaches South Americans a lesson in football.  It's about time they stopped the screaming and yelling, and it's time to put their 'brains' back to 'work'. By means of emotions and deafening noises no issues were ever reasonably resolved... This, by the way, is not only true for football matches, but in many situations of everyday life too. Especially during unjustified union actions undermining national economies, when massive crowds flock the streets to help 'solve' problems they have created themselves in the first place, due to their lack of discipline, respect for each other, and much more vice like this. All this in the name of democracy, goes without saying... 

I won't mention names...