Cristiano Ronaldo missed a penalty that could have been decisive in extra time against Slovenia and began to cry like a heartbroken child. Or like Maria de Medeiros in one of her films, there is no unanimity on this score among critics, nor among the public. He would later score another in the final shoot-out that helped Portugal advance to the quarter-finals, but nothing was the same in his mind as a destroyer of worlds, an insatiable devourer. That is why he turned to the stands to apologize to the thousands of Portuguese fans who insisted on cheering him on and perhaps to himself as well, because no one expects as much from Cristiano Ronaldo as Cristiano Ronaldo himself.
There is something natural and something perverse about gloating over his decline, because his career has been a continuous “me against the world” and the world, whether we like it or not, is full of people with too much free time who build their existence based on a few likes and an almost infinite number of phobias. Hating Cristiano Ronaldo has always been a comfortable position if we take into account the nature of the character, his rivalry with Leo Messi, who is a blessing, and the insistence of Ronaldo’s Christianity in forcing reality to fit its discourse of planetary injustice, of global persecution of a boy who was not to blame for being such a good footballer, so handsome and famous that even the most tolerable criticism became a cruel personal matter.
Some people expected Cristiano Ronaldo to surrender to the first flash of the Argentine genius. Or to burn Real Madrid from within, pure fire in a dressing room plastered with legends about camaraderie, humility, the theorem of the good champion and those old verses of “when you lose, you shake hands”. Noble dreams, after all, because we have always seen the footballers of the eternal rival as ideal sons-in-law whom we were too lazy to criticise. But the Portuguese did not surrender, nor did he adjust to the standardised norms of anti-Madridism, so each of his triumphs, personal or collective, was celebrated with a cry in the emptiness of the goal against, a defiant look and a millionaire smile that threatened to buy our houses to evict us from the world. Or build a new one created in his image and likeness, perhaps with a large statue of his legs in every square and with the warning “you will respect me” just below, engraved in stone.
The Cristiano Ronaldo of this Euro Cup is very similar to a mortal, to any footballer of the modern elite, to Morata, or to Marcus Thuram, but we should not be overconfident. We see him making runs in every transition, pressing the centre-backs, despairing at his lack of luck and even applauding his teammates, like those generals who see death approaching and begin to worry that someone will go to their funeral. But the Beast is still inside him, crouching, waiting for the definitive moment when it will rise from its ashes and remind us of what it has always known and we have not: that in this life and in the ones to come, we are all wrong except him.
“People think our life is simple, but if we want to change the furniture in this house we can’t sell it on Wallapop, it’s too big,” said Georgina, his partner, in the reality show dedicated to her by Netflix. It seems to me an almost perfect explanation of what is happening with a Cristiano Ronaldo that so many want to finally see shrunk without noticing the tiny size of our televisions.
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