Six and a half years later, at Compostela’s San Lázaro Stadium, Ronaldo had his Spinks moment. It is a goal that has been replayed millions of times: one that Nike used in an advert with the tagline “What if you asked God to be the best footballer in the world… And he listened?”; one that no matter how many times you watch it, leaves you breathless. The first defender had three wild kicks at him and grabbed his shirt.
Fighting him off with arse and forearm, he sent the second for some churros by stepping on the ball, taking two swift touches and accelerating away to goal. If you paused it there it is the best of Ronaldo in a microcosm. That he finally scored after running from the halfway line at Olympic pace and cutting inside two defenders, rifling home as he fell over, almost doesn’t matter.
“He is not a man,” said Real Madrid legend Jorge Valdano. “He is a herd.” It was a goal so magnificent that Bobby Robson, a football man of such purity that his socks were probably arranged in formation, leaped from the dugout, hopped around his technical area and performed what can only be described as a proto-Mobot with colour draining from his face. Finally calming down, he forced his hands deep into the pockets of h i s charcoal grey blazer and staggered back to his seat. “Ronaldo?” said Jose Mourinho, also in the dugout that day. “The best I have seen with my eyes.”
By the time Ronaldo joined his Brazil team-mates in Bolivia for the 1997 Copa America, he had already scored 20 goals for the Selecao at U23 and senior level since making his debut in a friendly against Argentina in 1994. Taking his Barcelona form to Bolivia, he was the outstanding player in the tournament as Brazil lifted their fifth trophy, and it was what he did in the final against the hosts that proved he was ready to become Brazil’s undisputed leader. After 78 minutes of being kicked to kingdom come and with the score resting at one apiece, Ronaldo dropped off the centre-half. Cushioning the ball onto Denilson’s left foot, he hit the space that the defender had haplessly vacated, received the return pass and leathered a murderous left-footed half volley from the 18-yard line into the top corner.
As the commentator nearly swallowed his tongue, Ronaldo just sauntered off with outstretched arms, soaring like a phoenix as his megawatt grin lit up the stadium. There are many differing accounts of exactly why Ronaldo left Barcelona after that tournament.
Some say his agents had asked to renegotiate his contract after the goal at Compostela and the Barcelona board refused, others said that his agents pulled out of negotiations when they heard Inter were going to double his wages. Whatever the reason, after 47 goals in 49 appearances and a Cup Winners Cup victory, Inter paid his buyout clause and signed the FIFA World Player of the Year for a snip at £19m. On Sunday, March 22 1998, Ronaldo scored his 17th Serie A goal of the season in the Derby della Madonnina against AC Milan at the San Siro.
After 75 minutes of running Desailly, Maldini, and Donadoni ragged (and showing Patrick Kluivert and George Weah who was the real swinging d*ck) in what was then the finest league in the world, he pounced. His teammate, Francesco Moriero, received the ball in the outside right position.
Taking it on his back foot with a glance forward, he saw that Ronaldo was already on his bike towards goal with only Marcel Desailly and Ibrahim Ba for company. Moriero’s pass was an absolute peach: it bent around Desailly and reared up at the back post just outside the six yard box, but the trajectory meant that Ronaldo still had a lot to do to turn it into a goal. In the split second where it looks like Ba might stop him, he leapt into a full karate kick and volleyed it with the outside of his foot, while in mid-air, over the onrushing Sebastiano Rossi. It was preposterous. It somehow came as no surprise, though. He’d been at it from the word go in Italy, and if his season at Barca was all about taking advantage of the large amounts of space afforded to him by embarrassed Spanish defenders, then it was at Inter that he became truly unstoppable.
Operating in tighter spaces, against teams who sat back and tried to negate his pace, and defenders who would prefer to be castrated on live television than to be seen giving up, Ronaldo opened up a box of tricks he’d filled on the futsal courts of Rio to ensure he stayed three steps ahead of the rest. He scored every kind of goal there is that season. The most important of his 34 being the beauty in the UEFA Cup final. Haring onto a diagonal through ball, he did that trick where he appears to be pedalling a bicycle, dumped the keeper, Luca Marchegiani, on his arse and rolled the ball into an empty net. Never in history has a player so often treated the man in the net as an 11th defender, to be embarrassed rather than being beaten with brute force. Sandro Mazzola, who notched over 300 goals for Inter in the 60s and 70s, winning two European Cups and four Serie A titles along the way, was a fully-paid up member of the fan club. “If Ronaldo decided to score, there was nothing you could do to stop him,” he later said about that season.
“He would do it in so many different ways, and sooner or later, just as an opponent thought they had him under control he would explode and score. He could not be marked on the pitch.” Yet it was his all round play that should be feted.
There’s a video on YouTube called ‘Ronaldo Brazil Impossible Technique and Dribbling Ever’. As snappy titles go, it probably needs a bit of work, but the content is 15 minutes of absolute fire. Nutmegs and elasticos, stepovers and dragbacks, all elicit a head shake as a 21-year-old – one with the weight of the world on his shoulders – revels in the simple glory of football in its purest form. His season in bel paese behind him, Ronaldo rocked up at the 1998 World Cup as the finest player in the world. Delivering a handful of bravura performances littered with goals, he dragged Brazil to the final ready to cement his growing legacy. When future generations look back, all that will be remembered is his seizure on the morning of the game – a seizure that resulted in him being left out of the starting line-up. The archives will state that he then reappeared on the team sheet not long before kick off and proceeded to play like, well, a man who had a fit 12 hours earlier.
Factually correct? Certainly. Missing the bigger picture? Absolutely. When a star reaches critical mass, it explodes with a cataclysmic bang that can briefly outshine entire galaxies. And if Ronaldo’s marketability had been on the burn since his move to PSV, it went fully supernova in the summer of ‘98. The super-light R9 Mercurials were released to a fanfare that forever shifted the paradigms of boot launches and designs, his buck-toothed smile adorned billboards and buses, and amateur players marched like worker ants to grab a slice of the man who had recently been christened “Il Fenomeno” by the Italian Press. Plastic bags, fizzy drink bottles, playing cards – his image could be found everywhere. Yet it was a three-minute TV spot that turned him into a global idol.
Ronaldo had already featured in several iconic adverts by t h e time France 1998 came around, yet all of them were knocked into a cocked hat by the commercial that dominated airspace in the run up to the tournament. Set to the glorious Mas Que Nada by the Tamba Trio and starring Ronaldo, Romario, Roberto Carlos and Denilson, it is a triumph of creative simplicity. “I know,” someone probably said in a room full of whiteboards. “Let’s just have them kicking the ball around in an airport and use an ace song, yeah?” It’s never been bettered. Clad in some tremendous leisurewear, the Brazil squad have a kick around that breaches every security measure known to man. When a spot of head tennis on a travelator and the sight of Lucio going through an X-Ray machine fails to raise suspicion, Ronaldo sizes up a shot.
In a moment of genius that instantly humanizes his talent, he hits one of those silver queue posts before burying head in hands and grinning sheepishly. With those big old braces gleaming, you can pretty much hear the twang of knicker elastic and melting of hearts. On the eve of the final, 24 hours before he became front page news, the French defence was filmed discussing how to stop Ronaldo. Manager Aime Jacquet, in a world-class case of missing the point, does a really slow stepover and states how easy it should be to stop him because he feints the same way every time. Mike Tyson once said that “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face,” and as Jacquet starts to repeat his assertion in glorious slo-mo, Marcel Desailly stops him in his tracks. “He did it to me at Milan, I didn’t see the ball. Whether he goes right or left you don’t see the ball,” he squeals before waving his arms around like a maniac.
“Where’s the ball? It is magic.” “He stays there like that,” adds Thuram, gesturing to his planted feet and laughing. “You look down and the ball is gone.” There would be no laughing from Ronaldo. The reasons for both his convulsive fit and subsequent inclusion in the starting line-up have and been pored over, sensationalized and spoken about to such a point that re-telling them is pointless. Yet the final makes painful watching.
There he is, football’s anointed king, trundling around the Stade de France looking confused, lonely and like his ball has been punctured forever. It’s football’s JFK moment. The Ronaldo of 1998/99 was a similarly forlorn figure. Every goal he’d scored before that season had been followed by a version of his Christ the Redeemer celebration. Due to a collection of niggling injuries and the inevitable hangover from his seizure, he could barely rouse himself to smile after scoring. Like the teddy bear your Mum refused to chuck in the bin, his stuffing was starting to stretch at the seams. It wouldn’t be long before they spectacularly burst.
On November 21 1999, Ronaldo ruptured the tendon in his right knee in a match against Lecce. Knee injuries are anathema to professional sportsmen and women, and there are a raft of studies that examine the psychological implications. Depression, anxiety, and overall poor mental health is high, and a holistic approach is recommended as the best route back to the pressures of professional sport. In the Italy of 1999, it’s doubtful that holistic health was high on the agenda of club doctors. Five months after his injury, Ronaldo was back on the field for Inter in the first leg of the Coppa Italia Final against Lazio. Seven minutes into his comeback, Ronaldo received the ball and drove at the Lazio defence. You can’t help but think “He’s back”. He most definitely wasn’t.
Feinting to the right, he planted his foot to push off towards a gap in between two defenders and collapsed. The image of him screaming as he grabbed his right knee and fell sideways hits you right in the chest, but continue past the pause and your guts will churn. He howled in agony for a full minute while a hapless physio sprayed water on his knee. Ivan Zamorano and Christian Panucci wore the faces of two men who had just witnessed a five-car pile up, and Zamorano’s already ghostly pallor became transparent with the shock. As Ronaldo was carried off down the tunnel, his screams echoed off the walls as walkie-talkies crackled and concerned men bellowed in Italian. “Sometimes I look back, and I think about the operations, when I was lying in a hospital bed and blood was pouring from my knee.
I think of that time, and the pain, and it gives me strength.” Delivered on the eve of the 2002 World Cup final in Japan, it was a quote that many never thought they’d hear. Make no mistake about it, the knee injury that kept Ronaldo out for the best part of two seasons was meant to finish him. It is hard to think of many sporting comebacks that rival a man with that knee – a knee that looks like a piece of lamb that has had a fight with a chainsaw – returning after spending the best part of two years out to score seven goals in the last 10 league games. That he then had the brass bollocks to fight his way into a World Cup squad beggars belief. I’m pretty sure you watched the 2002 World Cup. Whether you were a starry-eyed kid clutching a Panini album or an adult chained to the sofa for a month under a blanket of cans and crumbs, you’ll remember the goals. The flying kick volley in the opening group game against Turkey, the tap in against China, the assassin’s brace to slay Costa Rica. You’ll remember him shifting through the gears in the knockout rounds, nutmegging the keeper with a first time left-footer against Belgium and that ace slalom and toe-poke against Turkey in the semis. The artless toe poke, once the preserve of lumpen kids in cheap scuffed slip-ons, kids who got picked last and used the toe poke to try and obliterate your knackers, reclaimed as an art form in front of the world. Of course you haven’t forgotten the pair against Germany in the final. Finally breaking Oliver Kahn’s spirit on 69 minutes after Der Titan had repelled an endless yellow avalanche, then sweeping home when Kleberson (remember him, Old Trafford) and Rivaldo combined to set up a simple side-footer into the bottom corner. Eight goals in total that answered all the questions, stuck two fingers up to the doubters and proved that the king definitely hadn’t left the building. What you might not remember, though, is what had changed about Ronaldo. Most obviously was his overall game. Gone were the bursts from the halfway line: this was the sustained performance of a man who had realised he couldn’t be the same, but also that he could still be just as effective if he just positioned himself further up the field and destroyed teams in the last thirty yards. His celebration had also changed. The pre-1998 one was that of a man who totally believed in his talent. With a confident head nod and palms pushing towards the floor, it said “of course I’ve f*cking got this, don’t worry.” The semantics of his new celebration, though subtle to the naked eye, were markedly different. Running off in rapture with a double width smile, he opened his arms with palms pointing to the heavens as if he wanted to give the world a big hug. “I can still do it,” it said. “I can still score the goals.” Nine months after leaving Inter for €46m, Ronaldo and Real Madrid faced Athletic Bilbao at the Bernabeu needing a win in the final match of the season to secure Los Blancos’ 29th La Liga title. Since scoring on his debut in September, the now three-time FIFA World Player of the Year had lit up La Liga. Despite the star names, this was a finely balanced Madrid side that had yet to go full Galactico. With Makélélé bossing things, Guti and McManaman flitting around and Raul being Raul, Ronaldo wreaked telepathic havoc with Zidane and scored 30 in 44 games. The first of his league-winning brace that night is a beast. Luis Figo, all pomade and dipped shoulders, drove at the opposition right back before releasing the ball to Roberto Carlos. Overlapping at haste, powered by those worrying thighs, he drilled a cross across the box that took out the whole defence and left Ronaldo with a simple tap-in at the back post. The second was all about beauty. With the clock showing 61 minutes and the fans dancing congas, Zinedine Zidane bisected the Bilbao rearguard with a perfect slide-rule pass. Timing, weight, accuracy – it had everything. Ronaldo, spinning the centre-half to beat the offside trap, scurried onto it and buried it with his right foot. Running to the corner flag with the same childlike joy he’d shown a decade earlier at Cruzeiro, he’s showered in thousands of white hankies and mobbed by his team-mates. That game, hat-trick at Old Trafford aside, was the apex of his career in triple white. Beckham joined that summer, the team became unbalanced and they won jack shit until after he’d departed. Still, he scored over 100 goals for Madrid, and his bewitching presence on the ball and dead-eyed accuracy had a marked effect on a young tyro. “He was the best striker I have ever seen,” said Lionel Messi. “He could score from nothing and could finish better than anyone.” Culled: Goal.com
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