Full Coverage: World Cup 2014
The official music over, the deafening singing from the stands continued unabated for good minute more. It was hair-raising, goose bumps and all such cold shiver-inducing moments all rolled into one. The stadium, a roaring sea of yellow, just sang and sang, in one voice.
Then 11 minutes later, reality jolted Brazil's goalkeeper out of his reverie, when he saw through his still-bleary eyes, teammate Marcelo's feeble deflection roll past him into the net. Croatia 1, Brazil 0! This was never part of the script.
The start of an epoch-making World Cup in football's spiritual home after years and years of waiting, and suddenly the game was proving an impostor. The look on the Brazil's teams faces was priceless, like someone had picked all their pockets, or they had simply being conned into giving it away. Marcelo, the goal scorer in particular, had nowhere to hide.
Undeterred, however, the crowd never stopped roaring. It must have confused the tiny smattering of Croatian fans housed in one smug corner of the stadium - they were supposed to be cheering this shock goal, yet they were being drowned in all the noise from the side who was a goal down.
Were the Brazilian fans only too happy that a goal had been scored and the World Cup was finally underway - even if perversely, by one of their own, into his own net? Whatever the truth, it lifted the home team like nothing would.
Up until then, the game was on even keel - the Croats, if you believed, even having the better of the exchanges. In the seventh minute, when either side had hardly broken sweat, the ancient dinosaur Ivica Olic - also at 35, the third-oldest man on the pitch and tearing up the left flank as if he were a young colt out on its first run -- rose above Dani Alves to meet a cross and almost headed it in past Cesar. Brazil, its defence and Cesar, it appeared had forgotten to arrive, despite already being present.
At the other end, Stipe Pletikosa - again 35, and the final one - was proving the solid, imposing wall that swatted away anything that Brazil was coming up with. It was unfolding into one of those cruel, unwanted dramas that you still grope for answers to the morning after, and for more to come.
So, it was then Neymar took over. Discarding his wide left flank slot and straying into the deep middle, the 22-year-old spiky-haired waif of a footballer weaved and danced his way in and around the Croatian final third.
It unsettled the Balkans team, who had till, now seemed content with the confused patter that Brazil were adhering to. Now, suddenly, here was this variable that they didn't know how to contend with.
Significantly, by displaying his naked ambition to control proceedings Neymar grabbed the game from the listless grip of his fellow-strikers - Fred and the impressively-named equally impressively-built Hulk - who had till now failed to make dent on the game.
Equally crucially, while it was Neymar who moulded the days proceeding according to his standards and needs, Croatia ever lost their shape. In the end, they would right feel done in by the referee - Japan's Yuichi Nishimura - who allowed himself to be taken in by the occasion - first allowing Fred a dubious penalty which Neymar converted in fashionably errant-boy manner for the game's winner and then denying Croatia a few good calls towards the end.
But by then, Neymar had set the template for the game, if not the entire World Cup yet. He made his own teammates anonymous, if not totally invisible. Over quarter of an hour after the Marcelo own goal, he jinxed his way from deep in the right, cut past a swathe of defenders to place it past Pletikosa's outstretched left.
By the time he left, ten minutes from the end, to an uproarious send-off, a delirious crowd was only chanting his name. So loudly that when Oscar scored a brilliant left-footed third for the Selecao, the stadium, and perhaps, an awakening, world, was still hoarse from chanting, "Neymaaaar, Neymar!"
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=Neymar,Brazil,Julio Cesar,World Cup 2014,Croatia
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