James Lawton: Why we need Brazilian imagination and instinct to win

Germany's quest to equal opponents four wins pits Europe's finest defensive line against football graced by purest skill

It has to be Brazil in Yokohama tomorrow night, winning their fifth World Cup, painting new dreams, underpinning old, brilliant certainties, adding Ronaldo or Rivaldo or Ronaldinho – or maybe all three – to the roll call of legend that has coloured so many of our lives.

The Germans are of course a most formidable football nation, and they can boast of the most influential player in this 17th great tournament, the intensely defiant goalkeeper Oliver Kahn, who sometimes looks as if he might just have stood down from duty in the Afrika Corps, but if you stacked up all they have achieved in this tournament, and in all their impressive World Cup history, against the legacy of Brazil it would still not reach the bony kneecaps of the late little glory of the streets of Rio, Garrincha.

It is true that the Brazilians at times have been less than god-like here in the Far East. Some of their defensive performances have been a coaching nightmare. The wing-backs Roberto Carlos and Cafu have continued to display the madcap habit of charging down the field at the same time. The centre-backs Lucio and Roque Junior and Edmilson have gone missing in action so many times they would be dead meat at a military tribunal. If the Brazilian midfield exists, it resembles most a mock Main Street in a Spaghetti western, but when you say all that you still have to come back to the fact that Brazil alone of all the the leading nations at this World Cup have represented football that has not been shot through with fear and cynicism.

It has also been football graced by wonderful bouts of the purest skill. By contrast, the Germans have eked out victory over the likes of Cameroon and Paraguay. They were morally second best to Ireland and just plain lucky against the Americans. Their best performance, by a huge distance, came in the semi-final against the team that did most to give this World Cup genuine uplift, the superbly motivated – and honest – South Koreans.

Perhaps the most compelling reason to hope for Brazilian victory, apart from the sheer glory of their imagination and the instinct to make their dreams live, is that if they fail, and allow Germany to draw alongside them with a total of four World Cups, it might be possible to say that this entire tournament in the end came to mean next to nothing.

You would say this when you looked at the nature of the winning philosophy. It would not have been that of Senegal, raising the banner of African revolution so excitingly in the opening game in Seoul four weeks ago when they outran and out-thought the champions of the world, France. Nor the impeccably founded football of South Korea, which was about brave, intelligent running and consummate team-work, and nothing that began to hint of the kind of long-ball desperation into which the crusade of England fell so dismayingly. Nor the courage of teams like Ireland and America, most of whose players would be lucky to get a trial in Serie A or La Liga or the Bundesliga.

No, the prize would have gone to the old score-and-run merchants of Europe, whose most miserable representatives were Italy and Spain, who came here as potential champions and left whining about the "conspiracy" in favour of the South Koreans. It is true that both talented teams were victims of official error, but not mistakes fashioned by plot, just human foibles and, perhaps, even subliminally, the instinct of a "homer". But the Italians and the Spanish would have been much better advised to look at themselves rather than corruption which existed, plainly, only in their own minds.

What, really, have Germany brought to this tournament? A certain proficiency in set-pieces, no doubt. The prodigious Kahn, who has conceded just one goal, and that in injury time, and the excellent Michael Ballack, who, when he knew he would miss the final because of a second yellow card, promptly scored the goal which ensured the appearance of his team-mates. A comparison between Ballack and Paul Gascoigne and the relative hardness of the football cultures of Germany and England was impossible to resist. When Gascoigne received his yellow card he blubbered, and promptly became a household name.

The Germans have a spiky love of battle against the odds which scored its first great triumph in Berne in 1954, when Ferenc Puskas' sublime Hungarians were hounded into a 3-2 defeat, after racing into a 2-0 lead. It is such durability of the spirit which must worry the Brazilians tonight. Apart from other German triumphs, in Munich in 1974, when Johan Cruyff's brilliant Dutch team threatened to run amok, and Rome in 1990, there are the three near misses, none finer than the loss to England at Wembley in 1966, about which arguments still rage. In Mexico City in 1986 their tremendous craftsman, Lothar Matthäus, almost stopped the raging brilliance of Diego Maradona. He shadowed Maradona superbly for almost every minute, but he lost him once – and that was enough for the little man to deliver the killer ball. In Madrid, in 1982, Germany were undone by injury problems, and an Italy team buoyed by the constant threat poised by Paolo Rossi.

These are antecedents which might be withering to the psychological health of all but the Brazilians. But why should they worry about ghosts of the past? Do they not have a division of them on the march in Yokohama as the drums beat and the great stadium is shaded in yellow?

It is hard to argue with the astonishingly recharged Ronaldo, leading the race for the Golden Boot with six goals, when he says: "My joy is great but I will not detail for you the years of suffering. Every goal I score is a victory; every time I enter the pitch it is a joy. I can say the nightmare is over. Now I'm going to the final to get even happier with my work."

Rivaldo, troubled by injury, and Ronaldinho, back after the suspension which came harshly when he was dismissed for a tackle on England's Danny Mills in the quarter-final, are coming from the same place. Rivaldo started the tournament in ignominy, faking hurt and suggesting that a Turkish player had kicked the ball in his face. That led to the dismissal of the Turk and the bleak reminder that even the most talented of the most romantic football nation on earth was capable of a tawdry little piece of gamesmanship. But Rivaldo has redeemed himself with some glorious play, and a tattoo of goals, and Ronaldinho, like Rivaldo a product of the poorest of Brazil's poor, may just prove himself the player of the tournament in the last act.

The 22-year-old destroyed England with his brilliance on the ball and the exquisite free-kick which the defeated, and some of their professional cheerleaders at home, just couldn't accept as an example of football artistry. Despite the fact that his youth was marked by tragedy, Ronaldinho has a smile that is like the sun rising over Copacabana. The other day Brazilians journalists asked him to identify his heroes. Earlier Ronaldo and Rivaldo had produced the usual litany: Pele, Garrincha, Tostao, and Gerson. Ronaldinho said: "I don't remember those guys so well. My heroes are Ronaldo and Rivaldo." There were hoots of derision from his team-mates, but Ronaldinho insisted. "It is true. I'm only a kid. I'm living my football now."

He is doing it with exquisite balance and soaring ambition. His run at the English defence in Shizuoka last week kindled an old nightmare: Maradona's unstoppable charge at the Azteca stadium in Mexico City in 1986 which ended with one of the greatest goals in World Cup history. In Shizuoka, Ronaldinho delivered the perfect ball to Rivaldo, who gave David Seaman no chance.

It wasn't the ball of a fan to a hero. It was an exchange between equals which was touched with genius. Ronaldinho's is the latest face of Brazilian football. It is one which is filled with expression and, almost invariably, a smile. It is the fervent hope – and solid belief – here that it will shine on the planet of football tomorrow night.