Germany, Ozil and Loew: The Clay Triumvrate.

Watching the FIFA 2018 World Cup match between Germany and South Korea that has just ended, it was damn difficult believing it was the same German team that thumped Brazil 7-1 in the semi-finals of the 2014 edition of the same tournament that was on the field. The

magnificent squad that later went on to win the cup at the expense of Argentina. It is charitable saying the team was a shadow of its former self. No shadow, no matter how miserable, would want to be associated with this pathetic performance. Is this not the same team that used to be called the 'German Machine' by admirers all over the world? A moniker earned for competence, ruthless efficiency, crisp passing and wondrous organization. The squad we've just seen rather looked like a chapped-out car, a contraption coughing badly and no amount of pushing was going to make it start. Plenty of pushing there was, as strenuous as hell, millions of German fans at home and abroad doing all they can to urge on their team to glory, but Joachim Loew's team was simply dire. It was a car they couldn't even get to the mechanic. The fire-high passion of supporters would eventually get damped by a performance nothing short of a damp squib.
The prime architect of the heinous 2-0 defeat  was Loew himself, World Cup winner in 2014, now diving steeply and very fast from hero to zero. If Mesut Ozil and Sami Khedira played so poorly in the first match defeat to Mexico, and the team managed to win against highly-organized Sweden in the second match, why field them again in the final match? A crucial match that they had to win, take their own fate in their own hands and avoid the risk of depending on other results from the group. Perhaps he thought Mexico would beat Sweden. Perhaps he underestimated South Korea. Perhaps he has lost his gravitas for caution, shrewdness, alertness and judgment.
He had an able lieutenant in Ozil, the hero of 2014 that started Germany's precipitous slip in the current edition long before the tournament started by that notorious photo-op with Erdogan, the Turkish president, a rabble-rouser as loud and violent as they come. With Ilkay Gundogan, another German player of Turkish origins, it was not a little rumpus they caused team preparations by posing with Erdogan and calling him 'my president'. Only God knows the inspiration they hoped to gain from the pugnacious lout? And if they thought that muzzling opposition, clamping opponents into jail without trial and screaming at real or imagined threats were all going to be insightful, the idiocy of it all was ruthlessly exposed by Mexico and South Korea. Loew shouldn't have taken the pair to Germany. Just as he was with Arsenal, his performances were slow, lethargic and horribly sloppy and his body language bespoke that of a spoiled brat, a lout quarreling with team mates and himself. The upside of it all is that he knows he is finished in international football and needs a huge redemption at club level. He might have won the World Cup but hanging around his neck now is the unwanted medal of Germany exiting the tournament at a group stage since 1938, before the 2nd World War.
It is that bad. 

Obasanjo Quietens as Buhari's Sword Dangles.

Ex head of state, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo has suddenly gone quiet in his public spats with President Muhammadu Buhari. And for good reason. He knows Buhari is a no-nonsense army general and will not hesitate to move against him if only to show the whole world and his critics he does not believe in sacred cows and is not afraid of anybody. The sword of Damocles, read

Buhari

Obasanjo

Buhari, hangs low, ominously over him. Obasanjo was thrown off his strides by the sudden bringing up of the power projects quagmire by Buhari when the Buhari Support Organization paid him a courtesy call. The whole project and the sleaze that came to accompany it was the major black spot of his administration and there was no way he was going to wash his hands clean of it if it comes to judicial scrutiny. And the penalty could be severe. Two long-running cases of graft have of late ended in disaster for Rev Jolly Nyame, ex-governor of the north-eastern state of Taraba, who was sentenced by an Abuja court to 14 years in prison and Joshua Dariye, ex-governor of the nearby state of Plateau, who also bagged the same prison term. All to the glee of Nigerians, who want more big fishes nabbed by the hook of anti-corruption. Obasanjo is 80 and a single day in prison for him is going to be more than a disaster.  And recent history is not on his side. Lula, Brazil's former president has just been sent to prison to corruption and the sky has not split into two. Close aides have been advising him to pipe low as Buhari will just send him to prison for nothing and cronies now loud will not hesitate to abandon him and let him stew in his own juice.
Yet Buhari does not even need to arrest him or send him to jail. He only needs to set up a probe panel and that would be enough to finish Obasanjo. His enemies, who are legion will only be too glad to come to such a panel with sacks of indictments genuine or ludicrous. Many Nigerians will not be able to tell the difference, besides, having suffered terribly at the hands of corruption, they will not care to put accusations to much scrutiny. A probe will be a public, kangaroo trial for Obasanjo and he will hardly get any justice. $16b was wasted on the power projects, perhaps the largest single case of corruption ever in Africa, without a single wink of electricity to show for it and there is no way he is going to escape censure, even though no single instance of graft has been traced to him directly. The whole mess happened under his long watch of 8 years and the buck stopped on his table. It will be very difficult for him to handle the noise, the mayhem, the opprobrium such a probe will spew into the political space.
SAUDI ARABIA GETS A BLOODY NOSE.
The opening match of the current edition of the World Cup going on in Russia has seen Saudi Arabia ship in 5 goals against the host country, making an average Russian team play spectacularly. That is why the tournament is a World Cup and not a cup for the best gladiators. Otherwise a lot of folks will start querying the injustice of Italy staying behind at home and Saudi Arabia attending the tournament. In world football, Saudi Arabia is a midget and Russia is not itself oversized but the Saudis turned them into giants overnight.
Luis 'the snake' Suarez misbites.
The World Cup match between Uruguay and Egypt has just ended. The first half was cagey but the two teams came out in the 2nd half more adventurous and that section was more noteworthy for Luis Suarez's two glaring misses. He might have been more restrained in biting with his teeth but his biting feet seems to have been in remission with that disinclination. That is the stuff of which genius is made of at any rate and we expect him to be sharper in coming matches. In tight matches like this, a half chance might be all that is needed and Uruguay was grateful to seize it via a header by Athletico Madrid's Gimenez. Egypt will have to improve in the final third in subsequent matches.

Luis 'the snake' Suarez.

This Ghost Won't Go Away.

Yesterday, Brazil defeated Germany 1-0 in a friendly played in Berlin, Gabriel Jesus of Manchester City scoring the only goal of the encounter. Before the match, the Brazilian coach, Tite said the encounter would have a lot of psychological significance. A victory for Brazil would go some way in pushing back the ghost of the humiliating 7-1 defeat suffered by Brazil at the hands of Germany in the semifinals of the 2014 World Cup in Belo Horizonte. Right on Brazilian soil. It was terrible, and that is putting it mildly. Tite himself said that his wife started crying the moment the 5th goal went in. It was a collective national impulse. Even many people all over the world, one way or the other supporters of Brazilian football, could not resist joining the crying fray. There was the eerie felling a horrible destruction was going on on the field. Something great enduring was being torn to shreds.
But in truth, the real damage had been done after the 4th goal. It was the last straw that broke whatever the camel had left of its back. At 3-0 down, there was the poor hope, very poor hope, that stirring miracles had happened before in football from such hopeless situations. The fifth goal ruthlessly dispelled such faint stirrings. The agony was just unbearable for many. Some had desribed it as Brazil's darkest hour and it is very difficult disagreeing with that conclusion. It had been very few in the history of nations that a 29-minute capitulation threw a huge mass of the populace into a dark, wailing abyss which they could not climb out from for a very long time.
Hence the victory in the friendly match in Berlin that incidentally ended Germany' 23- match unbeaten run couldn't have come sweeter. It didn't matter that Mesut Ozil, one of the prime architects of what became known as the Horizonte Massacre, did not play. Any revenge in this regard would do.
But nothing is ever going to erase the memories of that notorious ghost. Like Hamlet father's ghost, it will always keep on coming back, no matter the revenge gained. Nothing will ever replace it. Some human and natural events are so unique, so peculiar, so stirring and striking that they cannot be repeated. Even if Brazil and Germany meet again in the next World Cup and there is a reversal of the 7-1 scoreline, the occurence might not elicit substantially more than a sense of deja vu. With a shrug. We've all seen that before, hadn't we? Brazil won the football gold at the Olympics, by defeating the same Germany but it will be the most amenable that will suggest they gained satisfaction from it over the 7-1 thrashing. France was to later emerge victorious, sort of, in the 2nd World War and even was to later occupy parts of Berlin but there was simply no erasing the pain and agony of Hilterite armies racing through France in the early stages of the war.
Few incidents in history can be compared to that defeat but not far from the mind is George Foreman's reverse against Muhammad Ali in the Rumble in the Jungle boxing contest in Zaire in 1974. Foreman was to become a very successful businessman and even later in life became the oldest heavyweight boxing champion in history by sensationally knocking out Michael Moorer but nothing would ever erase that defeat to Ali. Such events have such a powerful force of their own, such electricity, such magnetism that nothing will ever neutralize them. They insist on etching their memories alongside the stars in the sky.