Brazil – Japan 2-1. This match was like a wave reaching the shore — while it’s still taking shape out at sea, you can never quite predict how far it’ll climb up the beach, how hard it’ll knock into the sunbathers, read: the fans. This game had two waves: the first belonged entirely to Japan, a surge that lasted the whole opening half; the second — bigger, more powerful, a wave with a wider amplitude — came crashing down courtesy of Martinelli, Brazil’s match-winner, leaving nothing in its wake but the salt sting of the ocean, and Japanese tears.
Two completely different halves. In the first, the game played out almost entirely on Japan’s terms — and not just because they took the lead. Brazil looked genuinely incompetent in attack, and nothing illustrates that better than Vinicius having exactly one dribble attempt in the opening 45 minutes. He couldn’t get on the ball in the wide positions that suit him, couldn’t impose himself, couldn’t do what Vinicius does. The numbers back it up bluntly: Brazil had two shots on target in the first half, five in the second.
In the first half, Japan were still able to hold their 5-3-2 block — shifting into a 5-4-1 in certain situations — without being pinned back inside their own box for any sustained stretch, which is never really where they want to be. They could still launch coherent counter-attacks and make them count.
Sano put Japan ahead in the 29th minute, and by the 40th, the word that carved itself into my mind watching Brazil was simply: clueless. That said, it was hardly a surprise that Ancelotti would come out of the tunnel at half-time with an idea about how to turn this around.
Endrick came on as a forced substitution for the injured Lucas Paquetá, and with him came a rethought, more dynamic attacking approach. Brazil essentially locked Japan inside their own box, and the crosses started coming — the kind that had been almost entirely absent in the first half.
It was from exactly that kind of situation that Casemiro pulled Brazil level — a goal that wiped out what had been a largely forgettable performance, and a couple of sharp movements that, for a moment, felt like a glimpse of his peak-years self.
Ancelotti is a genius, and he proved it again here with what he did at half-time. By his own account, his philosophy is built around organizing a resolute and stable defensive structure while giving his players enough freedom in the attacking phase to express their creativity — and the sheer volume of positional rotations on the Brazilian side was impossible to miss.
Then, just when everyone had already mentally braced for extra time, Martinelli won it in the 95th minute and effectively shut up everyone who had been calling for Neymar to be on the pitch, unable to understand why he wasn’t coming on. My guess: he’s probably nowhere near 100 percent fit.
Overall, my feelings about Brazil remain deeply mixed. There was a stretch in this match where I caught myself thinking: bro, someone go check the favelas, because this team has absolutely nothing to do with Brazilian tradition. And yes, I know football evolves, everything evolves — but if I’m looking at pure, raw quality, I genuinely cannot think of a weaker Brazilian side in the storied history of this football nation.
And yet, on the other side of that coin, there is a philosophical approach that Ancelotti and his staff have brought to this team that I can absolutely see somehow grinding their way to the final. To do that, though, they need bodies — because an already thin Brazilian squad has now lost Raphinha and Lucas Paquetá to injury, Casemiro had to be subbed off, and Neymar looks like Victor Frankenstein somehow stitched him together just so he could be in the squad.
As for Japan — they should hold their heads high, because once again they’ve shown up to this World Cup at an extremely high level. But you simply cannot switch off for an entire half the way they did, whether it was fatigue, a lack of tactical adjustments, or both working against them at once. And that, in the end, is why they couldn’t step out of their own shadow — not this time either.
