“Why a previous coaching failure is back to lead his country out of its current crisis. His hair is the color of tarnished steel, brushed into an aggressive flattop. There’s that chilling, perpetually angry gaze, the tightly clenched jaw. A single tense vein throbs furiously in his temple. I’ll be back, he might have growled in that dull metallic voice, all those years ago, and now here he is. But whereas the original Terminator had the relatively simple task of destroying humankind, Carlos Caetano Bledorn Verribut, better known as Dunga, faces a considerably more daunting challenge – how to restore dignity to the most storied soccer nation in the world after an especially harrowing public humiliation.” Fusion

“Now that the dust has settled and the visiting fans and teams have packed up and gone home – their suitcases filled with for the most part happy memories – it is time to look back and reflect. And, most importantly, it’s for Brazilian soccer to ask the question with the complex answer: What went wrong? It is perhaps fitting that in this country blessed with such abundant gifts but cursed with a luckless history – colonization and slavery bleeding into a 21-year military dictatorship and now this modern Brazil, where a stable democracy is tainted by an often grubby and corrupt governing class – that the team left with the most regrets after this kaleidoscopic tournament is the host nation. Like the high school student with no date to the prom, Brazil was left looking sadly on from the porch as Germany and Argentina donned their best tuxes, climbed into the limo, and drove off into the night.” SI

“‘Stop. Stop. Stop, stop, stop,’ Caio says. He’s seen something. We’re on a side street in Rio de Janeiro — within walking distance of Maracanã Stadium, where Argentina is taking on Bosnia-Herzegovina in the first World Cup game the city is hosting — and a protest that had been marching on, compact and peaceful for the past hour, has just splintered. The packs of Rio police officers, who had been treading silently and steadily alongside the banner-waving protesters, suddenly formed a cordon. The tear gas quickly followed, sending the protesters helter-skelter. Now I follow Caio, a member of the independent media collective Mídia Ninja, a veteran of this kind of thing, out of the scrum. ‘It’s dangerous what they decide to do,” he says of the protesters. “The street is very small. There is no strategy.’” Grantland

“It was a whirlwind of a weekend in Rio de Janeiro. The drama began on Saturday with the third-place match, which is in and of itself a depressing affair. After being on the edge of fulfilling World Cup dreams, two teams are forced to conjure up one last effort to save face. Brazil, in its case, had just suffered one of the worst defeats in World Cup history and didn’t want to compound it with another loss. The Dutch coach, meanwhile, thought everyone should hang up their boots instead of tempting fate once more. Nothing felt right about the match, so instead I decided to visit the Maracanã, the epicenter of the futebol universe, where Brazil never got to play a match as host of this World Cup.” New Republic

“I first met Vitor Lira last December, when I was here on a reporting trip for an SI magazine story called The Two Brazils. The article examined the complex nature of a country that can both love soccer and engage in mass protests over the public spending and societal impact of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. Lira, 33, is a community leader in Santa Marta, one of Rio’s oldest favelas. Five generations of his family have lived there, and over the past two years he has organized resistance to the government’s plans for removals of Santa Marta residents as part of the sweeping changes in Rio around the World Cup and Olympics.” SI (Video)

“As the World Cup in Brazil comes to an end without the predicted large-scale protests, there’s been a subtle but consistent message visible on the streets, as photo-journalist Gabriel Uchida has documented. ‘Pichação’ is the punk brother of graffiti. Pichadores don’t want to make art, they want to shock, to vandalize. It’s made to be ugly and agressive. In Brazil it was born in São Paulo and their main influence was the typography of punk rock and heavy metal band logos. Although it is illegal, it’s the most current cultural expression in the Brazilian streets. It’s possible to see ‘pichações’ everywhere, even at the top of the highest buildings. As it’s made to protest, recently Brazilian ‘pichações’ have found a new target: the World Cup.” World Cup 2014

The Rio the World Cup didn’t show
“There’s shit in the water. Two days after Brazil crashed out of the World Cup, on Thursday morning, one of Rio’s foremost sanitation activists, Leona Deckelbaum, came down to Copacabana Beach to work. She couldn’t help laughing. Tourists swam in the ocean across the street, and up and down the coast in both directions. In a city with a terrible sewage system even in the fancy neighborhoods and no complete sewage or water service in any of the 900-plus favelas, this is a terrible idea.” ESPN

“In writing on sport there is always a fine line between reading too much into what happens on the field and reading too little into it. The problem is particularly acute when it comes to the World Cup: no other sporting event creates the same torrent of hyperbole and cliché, or incites quite the same kind of grandiose pontificating. The best of sports writing and commentary manages to deal with this through a combination of grace, humor, and true emotion: something that the Men in Blazers have offered us, thankfully, on ESPN, and that has defined the wonderful writing of Brian Phillips for Grantland during the tournament.” New Republic – Laurent Dubois

“I wanted to write a post predicting who will win the World Cup, but then truly, who really cares about my prediction? What do I know? I’m no pundit, not that pundits know anything anyway. Also, I’m a firm Bohrian. It was Niels who said, ‘Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.’ Basically, a child could do just as well as me. So why not have a child do it? Not just any child, but a refugee. I had friends who work with two NGOs ask kids served by their groups some questions about the World Cup. The first organization is the World Food Programme in Beirut, which provides essential food and nutrition to over a million Syrian refugees in Lebanon. The second is Faros, an NGO in Athens, Greece, that provides individual assistance and long-term, durable solutions for unaccompanied refugee minors, mostly from Iraq and Afghanistan.” New Republic

“Mauricio Lima has been in Brazil for the World Cup. Not exactly at the games, mind you, but going deep into the hearts — and jungles — where love of the game sustains and thrills (at least until the Brazilian team’s loss this week to Germany). He has ventured to a floating village where children kick improvised soccer balls along narrow docks, to a prison where inmates make balls, to an amateur tournament where teams and beauty queens compete together and to indigenous villages that are an overnight boat ride away from the nearest World Cup match.” NY Times

“Brazil’s Neymar broke down in tears as he claimed the challenge that ended his World Cup came close to paralysing him. The Barcelona forward, 22, fractured a vertebra in his spine when he was kneed in the back by Colombia’s Juan Zuniga during Brazil’s 2-1 quarter-final win. ‘I thank God for helping me, because if that blow had been a few inches lower I would have risked being paralysed,’ said Neymar.” BBC

YouTube: Brazil’s Neymar makes wheelchair claim