World Cup 2014: Brazil’s emotions are all change without Neymar

Deprived of the attacker, the hosts enter the semi-final against Germany as underdogs and that might just help them

Neymar, Brazil's great hope who is out of the World Cup, has been taken home by helicopter from their training camp. Photograph: Marcelo Regua/Reuters

For an apparently stodgy, even quite boring team, it must be said Brazil have provided a rich and operatic sense of drama at this World Cup. Fortaleza was a feverish place after the quarter-final defeat of Colombia on Friday evening. The seafront, which is always crammed in this steamy, restless city on Brazil’s northern coast, was extra-crammed, the air thick with fireworks and music. Just as notable, though, was the presence across the city of hundreds of fans outside the hospital where Neymar – pre-tournament darling, and now enshrined as a post-tournament darling whatever the outcome – had been taken for treatment on his spinal injury.

This was the split-screen reaction to the narrow victory against a fine Colombia team. “ALEGRIA TRISTEZA” [Joy Sadness] yelled the headline in Diário do Nordeste on Saturday morning, capturing what many have already characterised as the mutual assured destruction of Brazil and Colombia’s confrontation at the Estádio Castelão, a match that would have left neither in any state to confront Germany on Tuesday night in Belo Horizonte. Colombia because they are going home; Brazil because their defining presence and ice-cool leader from the front is also out of the tournament. To adapt a Gary Lineker-ism: welcome to football, a game where two teams beat each other up for 90 minutes and then Germany get to the final.

There are two things worth saying about this in the immediate aftermath. First, Brazil are not dead yet. Brazil minus Neymar still equals Brazil. Brazil minus Neymar equals an entirely different Brazil given the roles that pressure and a tearful sense of history seem to have played in the fraught progress of this team.

Maybe this can now shift a little. Brazil walked out at the Estádio Castelão in a trudging crocodile, hands on each other’s shoulders like men lost in the dark. This has been the feeling even before the tournament, a footballing nation waiting for a blow to fall, a sock to the jaw to match the famous ‘Maracanazo’ defeat to Uruguay in 1950.

We can, for the first time, say that this will not happen. Brazil will not be plunged into mourning if they lose a match. They have a release valve now, a lightening of the load. For one of the rare times since they first won the trophy in 1958 Brazil will go into a World Cup match as underdogs. You could almost argue Neymar has been sacrificed so that Brazil can rise again as unburdened outsiders. Who knows, deprived of their most liberated attacker, they may even begin to play with freedom.

So much for the emotional swingometer. The more urgent issue is how the team can be rejigged. Neymar has been Brazil’s chief threat, a beautifully supple, natural footballer who joins the play, finishes expertly, delivers fine set pieces, can beat a man and simply makes his team-mates fit. Here he has four goals and two assists (if we give him the corner against Colombia) in five games. He is, above all, the only member of this Brazil team to allow the stress to simply wash over him, to actually look like he is enjoying himself. Whatever happens from here, he has proved himself as a World Cup footballer.

Just a view on that injury: it came from a hard, punitive challenge in an aggressive match that a different referee might have kept within stricter bounds, but football remains a contact sport. Luiz Felipe Scolari’s pre-match promise that Brazil would “get physical” has scandalised some, but getting physical in football is not the same as getting physical in cricket or in the queue at the post office. You can play tough, fast, wide, narrow, slow – all within the margins rules and referee allow. It is a tactic. Plus, Neymar has also been kicked in every match here (remember Chile?). He has come back for more each time, as Lionel Messi and others also do.

How Scolari rearranges his team without him is an intriguing question. Brazil have had a Plan A and a Plan B. Give it to Neymar: and if that fails give it to Neymar again. There is no direct replacement in the squad, which explains why Scolari briefly tried to revive Ronaldinho’s international career 18 months ago.

The options look simple enough. Willian is the most likely replacement, with Oscar moving to the No10 role, from where he offers craft and an eye for goal. Bernard might come in if Scolari wants more speed in attack, but this seems unlikely. Perhaps Scolari will regret not having picked Lucas Moura, who is genuinely explosive.

Brazil have, in the distant past, produced players during a tournament. In 1962, Amarildo came in for the injured Pelé and was a star of a winning team. Four years earlier, Pelé was not an automatic pick at the start of the World Cup. Unfortunately, there no Pelés-in-waiting in this squad.

Against that, it is worth remembering that in between the fouls Brazil were good at times in Fortaleza, keeping the ball better and making plenty of chances in the first half. Hulk, who just needs one to go in off his impressively muscled backside – there are Brazilian internet shrines to Hulk’s backside – really does have to step up now.

Brazil’s other loss, Thiago Silva’s suspension, will mean Dante comes into the team, which, in its own way, is a timely return. Dante knows that German attacking midfield pretty well. He will not be surprised by Mario Götze dropping deep or Thomas Müller popping up in space behind Marcelo.

Against this it is still hard to look past reasoned pessimism at Brazil’s chances in Belo Horizonte. It is a simple argument. Without Neymar Brazil lack the tools to exploit Germany’s obvious weakness (at full-back and/or defensive midfield). Whereas Germany, with their wealth of inside-forwards, have more than enough craft to exploit Brazil’s own obvious weakness that are pretty much the same as Germany’s.

The maths look clear, and this is where Scolari will go to work. With Brazil second-favourites at their own World Cup they must play on the intangibles. The stadium was an absolute furnace on Friday night, and the Estádio Mineirão is a similarly hostile place when Brazil play. It is once again going to be emotional, and it will be as much Germany’s test to withstand the relentless white noise as for Mats Hummels and Jérôme Boateng to resist the wiles of Fred. (Neymar might have been a proper test for Germany’s mobile but not super-mobile back-line).

There is a side to this beyond the football. It is striking how resoundingly Brazil as a footballing nation have made the final step from underdogs to overdogs. Revered once as a finely balanced combination of expressive talent and permissible success, they are seen by a younger, more sceptical generation as something closer to football’s stormtroopers.

In part this is to do with being seen as Fifa’s lapdogs, an element in the murkiness of football’s global governance that is the legacy of João Havelange, to whom all roads eventually lead at this light-and-dark World Cup. Plus, there the over-familiarity of Brazilian players in Europe, these seasoned warriors of the champions and domestic leagues. The jogo bonito, a hackneyed idea even when Pelé coined it, died in 1974. But it is still routinely resurrected by those media outlets in need of a broad brush cliche. Hence, some of the hostility among those who see only a moderate team, bellowing hordes of fans and a World Cup tarnished by large-scale chicanery beyond the pitch.

Brazil might achieve something more remarkable than a win against the head versus Germany. Freed from their own sense of beseeching, god-fearing burden, they might even win a few friends if they can play with some abandon. Either way, this is a match that looks set to be styled as a liberating personal tribute to Neymar as the cloud of pre-emptive mourning that has followed Brazil around finds something tangible to cling to. There will be T-shirts, hashtags, banners and presidential announcements, not to mention mass fist-pumping tributes – and who knows, maybe even, at the last, a glimpse of something more broadly redemptive for this confusingly fraught Brazilian team.