Demands for justice absorbing Brazilians

As the Brazil team returns to Belo Horizonte for tomorrow's semi-final against Germany, their fans remain preoccupied with getting what they see as justice for injured striker Neymar.

In the city that will host the game, however, the population’s attention had been divided as the pain of Thursday’s overpass collapse in which two people died continues to linger. They too have been calling for justice over the weekend.

Neymar's exit from the World Cup has been a national obsession here, one fuelled by blanket coverage of the 22-year-old striker's movements – via stretcher, ambulance and helicopter – between hospitals and a tearful video message subsequently issued by the player in which he insisted that his World Cup dream could still be kept alive by his team mates.

The local media apportioned blame for their hero's fate more or less equally between Colombian defender Juan Camilo Zuniga and Spanish referee Carlos Velasco Carballo, calling for action to be taken against both.

They have adopted a wonderfully blinkered view of Friday's game, though, slamming Zuniga as "cowardly" and "malicious", Carballo as "inept" and "excessively lenient". But they conveniently overlook the fact that Brazil's repeated assaults on striker James Rodriguez went largely unpunished with neither Paulinho and Fernandinho, for instance, booked despite persistent fouling.

More fouls

Brazil committed more fouls in the game than Colombia and have, indeed, committed more during the tournament so far than any other team but one media commentator memorably described Carballo as being like Spain’s team: “a joke”.

There is still the hope here that Zuniga will suffer the same scale of punishment endured by Luis Suarez, something called for by Zico in his Guardian blog, despite the fact that the former player said he was not suggesting that the defender had set out to injure his opponent. Fifa's disciplinary committee was, as of yesterday, still considering whether to take action.

Zico, though, goes on to mention having discussed the general approach to discipline with Massimo Busacca, the head of Fifa referee’s commission who, he says, told him that officials were being encouraged to try to let lesser infringements go here in order to keep the game flowing.

That certainly seems to borne out by the disciplinary statistics with 60 of the 64 games played with the total number of bookings down by a quarter or more on every World Cup since 1990. The figure has averaged out at 2.8 per game with the figure at recent tournaments ranging from 3.7 to 4.5 with the exception of 2006 where the number was 5.39.

Greater leniency

The number of red cards is down too, by a third on four years ago and more than half on the admittedly exceptionally high figure for the tournament in Germany.

Intuitively, greater leniency might be expected to mean that more goal-scoring opportunities are prevented by defenders with more freedom to act.

That, however, does not seem to have been the case generally and Fifa is likely to be generally pleased with the outcome as the figures so far for the average number of minutes the ball is in play (56.8), the average number of goals scored (2.6) and the average number of passes made per game (389) are all up on South Africa where the comparable figures at the end of the tournament were 54, 2.3 and 353.

In Belo Horizonte, however, Neymar's plight and the most recent round of games generally has been viewed with a rather different sense of perspective with protests occurring over the weekend at the offices of the firm, Construtora Cowan, that built the motorway overpass which killed two and injured more than 20 when it collapsed late last week.

Denied wrongdoing

The incident has reignited anger over the cost, in both human and financial terms, of the many infrastructure projects associated with the World Cup that were overpriced and hurried but still never finished.

The company, however, has denied any wrongdoing in relation to the flyover on Avenida Pedro 1 which was constructed as part of a major public investment in the city’s Bus Rapid Transport (BRT) scheme.

The removal of debris from the site of Thursday’s disaster was halted by a local court that said the work should not take place until all of the tests to establish what went wrong have been completed.

The decision is likely to cause problems for those making their way to tomorrow’s semi-final but Colonel Alexandre Lucas Alves of the local Civil Defence insisted: “The work won’t be carried out in haste because of the World Cup. It will only be done when we can be sure that there will be no more casualties.”

That much is welcome although critics might argue it should have been the policy all along.