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There was an article on FFC the other day resolving Cristiano Ronaldo of blame for his woeful performance in El Clasico recently. It made a fair point as well; you win games as a team and you lose games as a team. Ronaldo just happens to consistently be on the losing side. But it got me thinking about Ronaldo and what it means to be a truly great player. In many senses of the word Ronaldo is clearly great. His goal tally is consistently remarkable and he would clearly get in to any team in the world, perhaps with the exception of Barcelona. He is universally feared by defenders and is the most expensive player in the history of football. Sounds as though he’s ticking all the boxes so far right? However, surely part of being one of the great footballers to go down in history you have to display a level of consistency in the biggest games.
I know it is an easy pop to have at Ronaldo to say that he doesn’t always turn up for the big games but bear with me because it is an important criticism. How can a player be truly world class or great if he has an element to his game that is missing? Surely truly world-class players are also ‘complete’ players yet Ronaldo is consistently inconsistent in big games. In fact you could even go so far as to say that he is consistently poor in big games, by big games I mean the matches against Barcelona, the cup finals. Not because he doesn’t have the talent to succeed and outshine everyone else on the pitch, perhaps it is more of a mental problem.
People always praise Ronaldo for how well he handles criticism, and for how he seems to revel in the hatred that comes his way from opposition fans. However there are signs that this isn’t true. Take, for example, his comments after the Sevilla game where he scored a hat trick. He said: ‘that was to shut people up’, which is fine, but he then went on to say ‘not that I mind the criticism’. So which is it? That he doesn’t like criticism and the goals were to shut people up, or that he doesn’t care if people talk badly about him? It doesn’t really add up.
Personally I think that anyone as narcissistic as Ronaldo can’t take criticism. He doesn’t mind people booing him when he’s playing well but when he has played badly it’s another matter altogether. And this is where his problem lies. He is aware that because he hypes himself up so much he has to perform well in the big games. So in matches against Barcelona for Madrid, or when he was playing for Man Utd in the Champions League final against Barcelona his performances are not what you’d expect. This is because he feels as though he has to do everything on the pitch, he tries to do too much. Particularly in the Champions League final he forgot that he was part of a team. The result is that he not only turns out below-par individual performances, but he hinders the performances of the team. Take his chance against Barcelona recently. Where normally he is aware of the players around him he forgot in that instance to look for his team-mates. Instead of passing to Di Maria who would have had a far better chance of scoring he took a shot from the edge of the box, which missed. It is just a small example but it seems to sum up his mindset when playing in big games when the pressure is on.
Clearly then this is a problem he can resolve, all mental problems are solvable, but, with the one exception of the Copa del Rey final last year, it is a problem he has of yet failed to address. In fact the longer he goes without being the star of the show in the biggest games of the season, the worse the problem will become. It seems the harder he tries, the more ineffective he is. I’m not saying that he is a bad player, that would just be ridiculous. He is an excellent player, but can any Madrid fan really tell me that they would not swap two or even three of his goals against Sevilla for one against Barcelona? Because that is the criticism of Messi, that he doesn’t perform as consistently as Ronaldo against the smaller teams. However I would rather have a player who you knew would always perform in the biggest games even if he didn’t always score in the smaller games. It is not as though there are not other players on both teams that could score against the smaller sides, but when you are playing in a game as big and competitive as El Clasico then you need your best payers to step up and put in a performance. As I said before: it is a problem that Ronaldo can address, but will his ego let him?
Follow me on Twitter @H_Mackay