Remembering Brazil 1-7 Germany, a ghost that still haunts the Seleção today

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"The wound is still open and this match is part of the process of closing it." (Tite, 2018)

Germany face Brazil this evening in a meeting of two great footballing nations. It is, of course, also the first since the most famous of all.

1,359 days ago Germany beat Brazil 7-1 in Belo Horizonte and changed Seleção history forever.

"I just wanted to give some happiness to my people. To my people, who suffer so much already," a tearful David Luiz said afterwards as the national post-mortem began. "Unfortunately we couldn't do it. I'm sorry, everyone. Sorry to all Brazilians."

"It’s the worst moment of my football career and the worst day of my football life," then boss Luiz Felipe Scolari added. He resigned six days later.

That day has stayed with Brazilians ever since and will be there when the two sides finally meet once more in Berlin.

"This has a huge psychological meaning - no one needs to fool themselves about that," manager Tite said on the eve of this evening's game. "The 7-1 from the World Cup is like a ghost. It's present, people still talk about it, but the more you talk about it, the less this 'ghost' disappears.

"It won't just be a sporting challenge, but a huge emotional challenge too. We are preparing to give our best performance, which will be important, but of course I also want a good result."

We were also at the Mineirão and the words that night still resonate three-and-a-half years on.

"They spent the previous four days weeping for Neymar. They will spend the rest of their lives grieving about Tuesday, 8 July, and the day that Brazilian football was demolished in one of its own great cities," read the introduction to our match report.

"In the list of great sporting collapses it is hard to think of an occasion as raw, as painful and as humiliating as this, when Germany scored five goals in 29 minutes against a Brazil team that had taken leave of any semblance of a game-plan. Extraordinary and excruciating to watch it was a World Cup match like no other. Even the Germans sensed that they should mute their celebrations, as if they were also bystanders at a solemn state funeral.

"Something was lost to Brazilian football yesterday that will never be recovered, not in this generation or perhaps many more to come. It was their misfortune that the second World Cup finals in their country coincided with one of the most mediocre Brazil teams in memory but even then no-one expected a defeat that Luiz Felipe Scolari himself described as “catastrophic, terrible”. This was football history being made. It was a realignment of how we think about the world game and where the power lies.

"'Ordem e Progresso' it says on the flag. Disorder and chaos on the pitch."

Tite watched the game back home in Sao Paulo and when Germany's third goal hit the net he reveals his wife started to cry.

“That started me off," he says. "It was a moment of great inspiration for Germany, every shot was a goal - stuff like that doesn't even happen in video games. Sometimes you get that in football, a team comes close to perfection and that's what happened to Germany."

"Was this worse than Brazil’s defeat to Uruguay in the 1950 World Cup decider at the Maracana? How could it not be?," our report read. "The final say on that will have to be decided in the endless days, weeks, months of debate that will follow in Brazilian society but the irony will not be lost on them.

"This was the tournament that was supposed to exorcise the ghosts of the “Maracanazo” and instead it has lumbered a whole new generation of Brazilians with a complex they may never shift."

Those watching in Brazil are hoping tonight goes some way to helping ease the pain.