SAO PAULO -- Neymar showed why he is carrying Brazil's hopes at the World Cup, scoring twice Thursday to help the underwhelming hosts escape a disappointing start to the tournament.
With Brazil struggling and down a goal against a spirited Croatian team, Neymar came through to lead his team to a 3-1 victory in the opening match, scoring once in each half. The killer goal that made the score 2-1 was a hotly contested penalty awarded by Japanese referee Yuichi Nishimura.
"Things weren't going well," Neymar said. "The first match is always difficult. We were anxious. We were nervous. I'm glad I was able to get the goals we needed at the time we needed them."
"He is a special player," Brazil Coach Luiz Felipe Scolari said. "We know that, and he needs to know that we know that."
Brazil got off to a slow start.
Defender Marcelo found his own net while trying to clear a low cross by Ivica Olic in the 11th minute, stunning the crowd of more than 62,100 packing the Itaquerao Stadium.
But Neymar tied it in the 29th, firing a low shot that went in off the post, although he admitted that he didn't hit the ball perfectly.
"It went in," he said. "It's all that matters."
The game turned on a controversial penalty awarded by Nishimura in the second half after striker Fred went down inside the area under minimal contact from defender Dejan Lovren.
Neymar scored from the spot in the 71st minute, getting his 33rd goal with Brazil. Croatia goalkeeper Stipe Pletikosa nearly saved Neymar's shot, but it was struck hard enough to deflect into the net.
The Croatians were furious.
"If that was a penalty, we should be playing basketball," Croatia Coach Niko Kovac said. "Those kinds of fouls are penalized there. That is shameful. This is not a World Cup referee. He had one kind of criteria for them and another for us. The rules were not the same."
As Croatia tried desperately to tie it, Oscar added to the lead in the first minute of injury time with a toe poke from just outside the penalty area.
A draw would have been a huge disappointment for Brazil, which had won its opening match the past eight times and is overwhelming favorite to win the competition.
"The team didn't give up," Brazil defender David Luiz said "We knew it would be hard, but we played well and got that first goal and then the victory."
The refereeing standards at the World Cup are always hotly debated.
Nichimura showed Neymar a yellow card in the 26th for pushing a forearm into the throat of Croatia playmaker Luka Modric. That incident sparked the first agitated clamor around the referee, and more followed as Croatian frustration grew late in the game and after the final whistle.
The message seemed to be lost.
"I never saw in my life that a referee don't speak English," defender Vedran Corluka said. "He was speaking something in Japanese but no one could understand him."
World Cup referees are required to speak English.
Although Nichimura is a full-time referee in his second World Cup, his performance revived complaints from Europe about varying standards.
Any matchup between a South American and European team is tricky for FIFA because it requires a neutral referee from a continent where fewer high-intensity matches are played. Throw in the fact that the host nation was playing in a stadium packed with noisy, fervent fans, and the situation gets even tougher.
"Unfortunately, the referee was completely out of his depth," Kovac said through a translator. "If we continue in this vein there will be 100 penalties in the World Cup."
FIFA's director of refereeing, Massimo Busacca, was aware of the challenge facing his match official teams long before the tournament started. Asked last week about players expertly bending the rules, Busacca acknowledged it was tough to spot "a foul from a simulation as it is mostly a question of centimeters."
"It is important that the referees show their personality in order to prevent bad behavior," the former Swiss referee said.
Busacca and Nichimura were colleagues at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, where controversy came early and often.
This year's tournament finally got underway as planned after months of talk about the preparation problems that plagued Brazil since it was picked as host seven years ago.
The troubled Itaquerao, which wasn't fully finished for the opener, held up without major setbacks to fans or the match itself, although part of the lights atop the pitch went out a few times for brief periods in the first half.
Sports on 06/13/2014
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