Cristiano Ronaldo Is Still Portugal's Key Piece, and He Will Remain So

As he waited to be interviewed by the host broadcaster in the Stade de France tunnel after Portugal’s historic Euro 2016 win, Cristiano Ronaldo craned his neck forward and stared into the camera. “How do I look?” he asked, tightening his cheeks and exposing that famous, gleaming grin. “Shiny,” came the reply from behind the camera. Ronaldo raised his eyebrows and laughed.

It was a strange night for Portugal’s captain in Saint-Denis—a night in which lots of the cliches about him were confirmed, and a host of others were consigned to the rubbish bin. Yes, he still has something of a hero complex, which was plain in the way he tried to carry on way past the point at which his match was clearly done.

The 16-minute lag between Dimitri Payet's challenge that injured Ronaldo's knee and the moment when the Portugal captain was finally substituted was painful viewing, as he fought against nature as best he could, hobbling across the turf. It was heavily reminiscent of his efforts in the 2014 FIFA World Cup, in fact.

Yet elsewhere, Ronaldo was the picture of the team linchpin, rather than the distant individual superstar. He made his re-emergence onto the field at the end of the 90 minutes, before the beginning of extra time. He then beckoned the group around him for a team talk after speaking to a number of them on an individual basis.

This was the public face of a role that had begun in the Portugal dressing room at half-time, with his tears of disappointment barely dry on his cheeks. “Cristiano had fantastic words for us,” said right–back Cedric after the game, as reported here by The Independent’s Jack Pitt-Brooke.“He gave us a lot of confidence. He said ‘listen people, I am sure we will win. So stay together and fight for it.’ He was fantastic, his attitude was unbelievable.”

It wasn’t the first time in the tournament that Ronaldo had showed himself as the team’s moral, as well as technical, leader. There was the famous footage of him convincing Joao Moutinho, another of the squad’s more experienced figures, to take a kick in the penalty shootout against Poland in Marseille (see below).

What followed on the initial encouragements of Sunday night, though, was for many the most extraordinary sight of Ronaldo during the tournament. The sight was more striking than the delicious finish against Hungary that opened his account for the summer, or even the prodigious leap that enabled him to head in against Wales: his performance on the Stade de France touchline.

Ronaldo was a man possessed, especially as Portuguese eyes around the stadium looked up towards the clock on the scoreboard after Eder’s goal put them in front. At one point, he even grabbed his coach Fernando Santos with a total mania.

In the moments directly after Eder’s strike, he wandered off along the touchline to briefly agonise on his own, echoing the scenes in the recent documentary, Ronaldo, in which his mother Dolores is a tortured, anxious spectator watching her son play on television with close family.

Up level with Santos on the edge of the technical area, matching (and even surpassing) his coach’s every exhortation to his players, it was a football version of the omnipresent LeBron James’ own touchline coaching, calling every play, every detail as he loomed over erstwhile Cleveland Cavaliers tactician David Blatt.

The big difference here is, unlike with LeBron and Blatt, Ronaldo is not planning an overthrow. The experienced Santos understands what Ronaldo’s role is and what it should be. Like his predecessor Paulo Bento, Santos knows that Portugal will get the best out of the talisman by playing for him.

The only thing is, what that entails has changed enormously in the last few years. Bento, who already had a relationship with Ronaldo after their paths crossed at Sporting Clube de Portugal, concentrated on keeping it simple. By employing him in the same role as Real Madrid did, starting on the left with the freedom to burst from deep and come inside, he got performances for Portugal out of Ronaldo far more faithful to his club form than previous manager Carlos Queiroz had ever managed to.

Ronaldo is no longer that player. Part of Santos’ mastery of Euro 2016 was in the safety-first tactics that so frustrated a large part of the continent watching on. Yet those tactics, as previously discussed in this column, were also about getting Ronaldo closer to goal, sparing him too much running and providing him with adequate support, which is what the 4-4-2 did.

The captain no longer comes to get the ball, but that doesn’t matter. Even before he started to hit the goal trail in the Euro, the supporting cast were doing their job, which seems to have gone unnoticed in many quarters. Ronaldo has 20 efforts on goal in the first two games of the Euro (not all from direct free-kicks, before you ask), so his team-mates were clearly doing something right.

This should work going forward. Ronaldo’s physical strength and his phenomenal finishing power will sustain him as the explosiveness starts to leave his legs, which is already happening.

Like Steven Gerrard gradually moving into a deeper role in Liverpool’s midfield, it is something that the player himself has not found easy to accept, however. It was perhaps buried under his ungracious comments about the opposition, but as recently as after the first game of the tournament against Iceland, Ronaldo told journalists that his preferred position was on the left.

What this victory does, however, is prove Santos right, and it appears Ronaldo has begun to grasp that. He needs his team-mates now more than ever as he evolves, but they need him, too. He has been a leader for Portugal for many years, but he is becoming a different sort of leader. In the future, he is unlikely to sweep teams away single-handedly, like he did Sweden in the play-off for the 2014 World Cup.

He will, however, hold his team-mates accountable to the highest possible standards—not unlike, in some ways, a fellow obsessive in his former Manchester United team-mate Roy Keane. In turn, the likes of Renato Sanches and Bernardo Silva, who missed the Euros through injury, will provide him with the chances to augment his legend.

Portugal always honours its legends, as the players showed on Monday when they posed with the trophy and photo of the late, great Eusebio. The biggest compliment you can pay Ronaldo, certainly from a Portuguese perspective, is that he is a more than worthy successor to the King.