Let Cristiano Ronaldo Leave
The questions at the Portugal camp ahead of Saturday’s game against Albania will inevitably concern the future of the Manchester United player. We remember the pantomime of a year ago when daily bulletins demonstrated with increasing clarity Ronaldo’s desire to join Real Madrid. Manchester convulsed.
Five days into the post-Champions League wake the lessons of the defeat to Barcelona make United’s position regarding Ronaldo less not more acute. Barca reminded Sir Alex Ferguson and the rest of the world that there is another way to play the game that relies on qualities even greater than those possessed by the Portuguese.
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The beauty in the Catalan template is not so much the individual merit of Lionel Messi, Andres Iniesta and Xavi Hernandez, deep though that is, but the regard they have for each other which manifests itself in a work-rate and sense of togetherness United couldn’t match.
Many years ago the holy trinity that was Ruud Gullit, Frank Rijkaard and Marco Van Basten performed comparable miracles for Holland and AC Milan. After lifting the 1988 European Championship trophy Gullit smiled when he was asked how Holland made the game look so easy. It might look that way, he said, but looking good is bloody hard work.
We are still waiting for Ronaldo to track back in a red shirt. Messi and Co would run twice around the Nou Camp to recover possession. Iniesta is probably still at it now. Loss of the ball is theft. There is no pouting impatience intended to rebuke lesser team-mates. It is all hands to the pumps, not hips.
This is the difference between Ronaldo and the three amigos. As outrageously gifted as Ronaldo is you sense that this brilliance is delivered in his own interests first. Fantastic when it comes off, but not so good when things do not go his way.
Barcelona enchant as well as enthral. The joy they take from the game is obvious, conveyed in passages of triangular exuberance. The experience is genuinely uplifting. You can’t but smile as you watch them weave their exquisite patchwork. Even opposing supporters are disarmed. The fans of Manchester United, devout in their attachment, could not bring themselves to complain. Barcelona transcended allegiance in Rome. They entered all our hearts.
This paean to Catalonia does not seek to demonise Ronaldo but to recognise how the consequences of the Barcelona experience for Manchester United might have changed the dynamic at Old Trafford.
Wayne Rooney walked out of the Olympic Stadium hailing Iniesta as the best player in the world. He is not. But in the context of a team ethic it appears that way. How much better might Rooney appear were Ronaldo to share in the leg work the Englishman puts in, to embrace his team in the reciprocal way Barcelona’s stellar men do. Rooney has arguably more clubs in his bag than Iniesta, but in Rome he was left flailing away in a bunker of despair.
Sir Alex Ferguson was another deeply moved by the beating. Ferguson is a master of renewal. He has excused Ronaldo in the past because on balance that was the right decision for his team.
Equally Ferguson has never run from a difficult decision. He noted how the sense of unity, of camaraderie, appeared to give Barcelona an extra man. This was only one game, of course, and he can point to countless occasions when Ronaldo has made the difference.
But there is more to it than that. A football club is not only the 11 that takes the field. No. It is every member of the squad, anyone who wears the tie, in whatever capacity. Every man jack of them represents, indeed makes up, the thing that is the club; that gives it its identity.
So when Messi pledges his career to Barcelona he is committing himself not only to the first XI but to an institution, a brand, an ideal. No one asks Messi where he will be playing his football next season. He and Barcelona are indivisible. No one asks Rooney. They don’t have to. The question recurs in the Ronaldo tale because the player considers that his own interests are not necessarily those of the club. He could lay all speculation to rest by saying unconditionally, as Fernando Torres has at Liverpool, that he is at the club for which he wants to play.
After Rome it might be that Ferguson decides the time has come to leave Ronaldo to his Real Madrid dream and get on with building a team. Barcelona demonstrated the beauty of that thinking
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/cristianoronaldo/5417707/Let-Cristiano-Ronaldo-leave-Manchesster-United.html
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