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For 10 minutes, the World Cup obeyed the script that Neymar and Brazil had prepared for it. The supreme talent of the greatest footballing nation on the planet had delivered a moment worthy of crowning any triumph. If the Hexa dream had indeed come true in Doha next Sunday, Neymar’s majestic solo strike would have been the moment when it all clicked, when Brazil had proven they had the grit to go with the gold.
Instead Croatia left Brazil pondering what Neymar had not delivered. The misses in normal time, the penalty that never came. The moment to define a career has been ripped away from football’s most expensive player.
The harsh truth is that might now be Neymar’s place in the history of the game. That $263 million move to Paris Saint-Germain was an attempt to strike out from Lionel Messi’s shadow, to be his own man and to cement his status as one of the best players on the planet. He has always been that but what Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and even Luka Modric have had are several of those moments where they have taken the spotlight on the biggest stage. Since leaving Barcelona, where he masterminded La Remontada and for whom he was playing when he won Olympic gold in 2016, Neymar has not.
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On Friday he might have, only for it to be torn out of his grasp by Croatia’s first shot on target, Bruno Petkovic’s shanked effort that deflected off Marquinhos and beyond Alisson’s glove. If there were any points in this sport for artistic merit then there would be no way that goal could draw the Croatians level with the stunning strike that seemed to have broken their resistance.
Picking the ball…
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