Twenty minutes earlier they had been running manically, in between little leaps of joy, going off in different directions like a catherine wheel. Now Brazil sat in a broken huddle in the centre circle, and they wept.
There was to be no dancing tonight: not during a stodgy opening hour, nor even when Neymar scored what felt then like an iconic career-defining goal, for the overriding emotion had been not joy but relief at a dogged opponent finally dislodged. Certainly there would be no jig at the end of a penalty shootout lost, the culmination of a tense and draining night that killed off Brazil at this World Cup, and with it an entire belief system.
