From the outset, I should say that Cristiano Ronaldo’s recent behaviour is totally unacceptable. Showing respect to your team-mates, your manager and your club’s supporters are amongst the fundamentals in football and to refuse to come on as a substitute, as Erik ten Hag has confirmed, and retreat to the dressing room with a game still in progress takes a flamethrower to one of the primary dressing room codes.
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In a team game, where the basic principle is that you’re all in it together win or lose, such a display of selfishness and petulance is desperately unprofessional and it’s right that Ronaldo should be disciplined by Manchester United because of it. His was a terrible example to set and it’s a shame that instead of reflecting on their best performance of the season against Tottenham Hotspur, Ten Hag has been forced to talk about someone who only figured on the periphery.
Having said all that, I do think it’s important to examine the nuances of Ronaldo’s situation and to try and look at it from his perspective, in terms of who and what he is and what he’s been through. He’s one of the biggest names the game has ever seen, a marvel for two decades, always the first name on the team sheet and the big-stage player who can reliably be called upon as a saviour, to win the game.
Even in the context of Manchester United, his numbers remain ridiculously good. His 24 goals in 38 appearances in all competitions last season for what was a poor team by their standards tells you that he carried them, more or less. Can he still finish? Obviously, he can. Is he in great shape? Absolutely, he’s a physical specimen. Could he play for 90 minutes? Yeah, he could, and I don’t have any doubt that he would still get into a majority of Premier League sides.
And so I understand Ronaldo’s anger and frustration, because being the best is all he’s known. He’s been the main man, the focal point, the trophy-laden superstar, one of the best players in the world, if not the best, and now for the first time in his career, he has a manager telling him he’s no longer integral, that he can’t do something, instead of looking to him to make the impossible seem routine.
I get that his conduct looks bad — and it is bad — but the context in Ronaldo’s case is how unprecedented it must feel to be normal. How strange it must seem to be on the same planet as everybody else, when you hold yourself to the highest standards of performance. When you’re a force of nature and your force is blocked.
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We shouldn’t forget, too, that the World Cup will be high on Ronaldo’s personal agenda and that, as usual, Portugal will be expecting him to produce, that he needs to be fresh and playing. It must be difficult to have that on the horizon while knowing to the core of your being that in different circumstances you would still be banging in goals. I don’t condone the way he’s acted, but I do think there’s some mitigation.
So why is he being left out? Because he simply can’t press in the way Ten Hag wants. When he came on against Everton the other week, running in behind and scoring the winning goal, Ronaldo demonstrated that his ability and instincts are undimmed, but at elite clubs in the modern game managers play at 100mph. The energy level is full-on and without the ball, you need 11 incredibly fit players to defend.
Ronaldo warming up against Tottenham Hotspur on Wednesday night at Old Trafford (Photo: Alex Pantling/Getty Images)It’s not just Manchester United. It’s Manchester City, Liverpool, Spurs, Arsenal and Chelsea, too; all of them press from the front and all of them play systems where every single person has to be at it. It’s press, press, press. Four months shy of his 38th birthday, Ronaldo can’t be that player anymore. I don’t care who you are or how well you look after yourself, it’s impossible at that age. Time is the one opponent you can never beat.
For any elite athlete, this moment is very difficult to accept. I’m not putting myself in Ronaldo’s bracket, but I have experience of playing at the top level while confronting my own mortality. Nobody loved football more than me. I never missed training and I was never late, but it’s horrible, really horrible, wanting to do something and being urged to do it by your brain, while realising that your body can’t get there anymore.
I was left out of the Newcastle United team by Ruud Gullit in that infamous derby game against Sunderland all those years ago. En route to defeat, I remember Ruud looking over his shoulder in the dugout at Duncan Ferguson and me and telling us to warm up. ‘Oh, so now you want me,’ I thought. I would have loved to tell him to f*** off, but as hard as it is, you’ve got to bite your lip, try and change the game, be as professional as possible and address everything else afterwards.
Shearer left on the bench for the match against Sunderland in August 1999 (Photo: NCJ Archive/Mirrorpix/Getty Images)A few seasons later, Sir Bobby Robson didn’t pick me for an away fixture at Aston Villa and it was the same thing, a huge dent to the ego when you’ve been the main guy for so long. There’s a disconnect between knowing you can’t quite do everything you used to, that you might have lost half a yard of pace, and actually accepting it, because you still have the same hunger and attitude and mentality. It must be harder when you’re a phenomenon like Ronaldo.
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You also know — or should do — that people will be looking at your response, inside and outside of the dressing room. Of the 74,000 people who packed into Old Trafford against Spurs, I wonder how many were there because of Ronaldo? Nobody wants to see him behave like that, stropping down the touchline, and that’s where we have to flip this back to the start. His reaction was really poor and not for the first time. He should be bigger than that.
It is an extremely delicate situation for Ten Hag, but the Dutchman has to be commended for the way he’s handled it. Ronaldo is a special, one-off player who carries great sway and influence, but although a manager can make allowances for individuals, he has to put the collective first. I said during my television co-commentary for the Spurs match that in Ronaldo’s absence Bruno Fernandes took greater responsibility and Marcus Rashford enjoyed more freedom. They were better without him. Is that a coincidence?
The balance for Ten Hag is to maintain discipline without ending relationships and risking poison seeping into the dressing room. From the outside, he looks to have got it spot on. He has been measured but firm in what he’s said publicly.
The truth is that Manchester United shouldn’t have signed Ronaldo in the first place. It always looked like a reactive move, an attempt to ensure that an iconic player from their past didn’t end up at City, their great rivals. How true that is and how keenly City really wanted him, I guess we’ll never know, but it certainly wasn’t done with team-building or strategy in mind, however much it brought a short-team lift to morale.
Turn back the clock and it’s interesting to consider what might have happened if Ronaldo had ended up at City. He wouldn’t have played every game there either, I know that much. At an elite, winning team, it would have been easier for Pep Guardiola to leave him out and I suspect Ronaldo’s attitude would have been better because he would still be at a club challenging at the top and playing his part there.
What we have seen instead is a slow shrivelling and the ticking of time. Sad.
(Top Photo: Dan Mullan/Getty Images)
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