July 8, 2014.

Brazil Embarrassed as Ruthless Germany Wins 7-1

He paused as though he expected Winston to speak. Winston had tried to shrink back into the surface of the bed again. He could not say anything. His heart seemed to be frozen. O’Brien went on:

It’s been a peculiar World Cup. The group stage, a stupendous goal fest, had people proclaiming this tournament the greatest in history almost as soon as began. Then that period gave way to a series of fraught, low-scoring knockout matches. They’ve been compelling, by and large, but maybe the tournament could do with an injection of that early excitement to remind everybody that it’s still happening.

"And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. Everything that you have undergone since you have been in our hands----all that will continue, and worse. The espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the executions, the disappearances will never cease. It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph. The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism. Goldstein and his heresies will live for ever. Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon and yet they will always survive. This drama that I have played out with you during seven years will be played out over and over again generation after generation, always in subtler forms. Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible----and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end you will do more than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it."

Brazil-Germany, on Brazilian turf, should deliver. This will be a game of incredible intensity between two teams for whom success on the soccer pitch is a matter of national pride.

Winston had recovered himself sufficiently to speak. "You can’t!" he said weakly.

But what kind of game it will be will come down to how Brazil decides to play in the absence of its biggest star. Without Neymar----the tousle-haired beach infant who was supposed to win glory for Brazil before he fractured a vertebrae against Colombia – his teammates could go down one of two paths. They could: