Roberto Martinez answered a question with a question. “Can I ask you something?” he said when invited to justify Cristiano Ronaldo’s continued selection in Portugal’s starting XI. A goalless performance against the Czech Republic in Leipzig had brought up a familiar topic. If Ronaldo doesn’t score, what else does he bring to the team apart from the histrionic gesturing of a frustrated traffic warden?
He doesn’t press the goalkeeper. He doesn’t track back. He has played 18 months in the Saudi Pro League. He’s nearly 40. The intensity at the Euros, where youth has come to the fore, is higher. Arda Guler broke his 20-year record to become the Euros’ youngest goalscorer in Turkey’s win over Georgia. Surely, no team with the ambition of winning the competition can carry passengers, no matter how prestigious?
“Do you know how many minutes Ronaldo played last season?” Martinez knowingly queried. A lot, came the reply. Nearly 4,000. “Then you answered your own question.”
Clocking up game time as the poster boy of a de facto start-up league is one thing. Making the difference at the Euros is another. So Martinez’s defence of Ronaldo went further. He is not indulging the five-time Ballon d’Or winner’s desire to reach 250 caps. He is leaning into Ronaldo’s experience, his knowhow and his handling of hostile atmospheres like the one that awaited Portugal against Turkey in Dortmund, where 23,000 Turkish-Germans are resident. “If you want to analyse the stats, all you have to do is look at what Cristiano has done in the last 12 months,” Martinez continued. “He’s in the national team because he deserves to be. He scored 51 goals in 50 games and his physical stats back up that he can play every four days.”
Dropping him, as Martinez’s predecessor Fernando Santos did for Goncalo Ramos in the Switzerland game at the World Cup in Qatar, never entered his head. Ronaldo may not yet have added to his record 14 goals in a record six European Championships, but he has found other ways to be decisive. “(Francisco) Conceicao’s goal (against the Czech Republic) happened because Cristiano made space for him,” Martinez observed of his team’s winner in that match.
A goal will come. Ronaldo scored 10 in nine qualifiers as Portugal won every game. He will surely score at the Euros. But he didn’t again in Dortmund on Saturday.
Ronaldo fell over when Nuno Mendes pulled the ball back for Bernardo Silva’s first goal at a major tournament. Orkun Kokcu’s outstretched leg knocked the ball out of his path. He missed Portugal’s second, a Samet Akaydin own goal, because he had turned to vent at Joao Cancelo for misplacing a through ball. Ronaldo had earlier failed to connect as forcefully as he would have liked with an early volley. He later reprimanded himself for not making more of the kind of header he would have buried in the past.
Cristiano Ronaldo and Joao Cancelo were all smiles moments after the captain had been furious with his team-mate (Friso Gentsch/Picture Alliance via Getty Images)
Pitch invaders marked Ronaldo closer than Turkey’s ragged centre-backs. Four got to him during the game. He posed for a selfie with the first one, an elusive kid. The next one, who leapt from the roof of the dugout, interrupted Portugal’s build-up play, infuriating him. “It’s a bit annoying in terms of always having to stop the game because a fan enters the pitch,” man of the match Bernardo said. “But that’s the price you pay for being the most-recognised player in the world of football.”
When Ruben Neves chipped a ball over the top for Ronaldo to chase down the channel, a gilt-edged chance finally arrived. Ronaldo found himself one-on-one with Altay Bayindir. But instead of going it alone, he played a square pass for Bruno Fernandes to score a tap-in. Fernandes had not done the same for him in the play-off against North Macedonia that sent Portugal to the last World Cup two-and-a-half years ago. Martinez called Ronaldo’s decision “spectacular” and a “pure moment of Portuguese football to be shown in every academy in Portugal and the world of football” because, as “an out-and-out goalscorer who lives for goals”, he showed unaccustomed altruism.
It was Ronaldo’s seventh assist in six European Championships, another tournament record for his collection, a testament to him outlasting so many of his peers. Fernandes’ goal killed the game and wrapped up top spot for Portugal. They will play the best third-place finisher from Groups A, B or C in the round of 16 in Hamburg.
Martinez was keen to underline the competitiveness of his dressing room and strength in depth, hinting he might rotate the team for Portugal’s final match of the group stage against Georgia on Wednesday. Will he leave Ronaldo out then? The alternative to him, Ramos, got taken out by a steward in a desperate effort to stop another selfie-hunter from reaching Ronaldo at full time. Luckily, the Paris Saint-Germain striker seemed unhurt.
“We were lucky the intentions of the fans were good,” Martinez said. “You can understand it was a difficult moment — if those intentions are wrong, the players are exposed and in danger. We should give a message to the fans: it’s not the right way. You’re not going to get anything out of it and what will happen is the (security) measures will get tighter.”
Ronaldo is not at the Euros for selfies. He’s here to win a second European Championship and if he can’t score, he’ll find another way to help his country do it.
(Top photo: Etsuo Hara/Getty Images)
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