MOSCOW: There’s something transfixing about watching Cristiano Ronaldo off the ball. Especially when the ball is nowhere near him. His entire body language screams ‘apex predator’, even more than when he’s creating vortexes in the grass with this mazy dribbles that suck down opposing defenders, berating his own teammates for having the audacity to pass to someone else or completing one of his trademark celebrations.
He lurks between unsuspecting defenders, his head slightly sticking out like a big cat waiting to pounce, his chest puffed up so much that you suspect a pinprick would make him explode.
He casually stands behind the last defender, blatantly offside, and is initially ignored. But soon the entire defensive line backtracks to suit his requirements because, let’s face it, you don’t want to be a defender and not know where Cristiano Ronaldo is on the pitch! And when the time traveler inside his head tells him where the ball is going to be played out to in five minutes, he sprints, leaving everyone else stuck in the past.
On Wednesday, Portugal wouldn’t have beaten Morocco without him — they barely managed to do that with him. The champions of Europe were dominated for large portions of the game by the best team in Africa as the Moroccans squandered chance after chance to draw level after Ronaldo’s early header at the Luzhniki. That is a recurring theme from the first round of matches — Portugal would have been trounced by Spain in their opener without him. Instead of being on the brink of an exit, they now find themselves in with a good chance of topping the group.
And the man wasn’t even at his best — he was largely anonymous after his goal. To be fair, Portugal were playing with so many men behind the ball that one of their favourite sons, Jose Mourinho, would have sat up in pride and Ronaldo was being starved of service. And he did have his moments of mediocrity. There was a free-kick in the first half where he pulled up his shorts, stood with his legs forming a perfectly inverted V and smacked the ball straight into the wall. There was that chance where he was faced with an open goal and still chose to put the ball into the third tier of the stadium. And there was another free-kick towards the end, right on the edge of the box, where he once again failed to clear the wall. This was far from vintage Ronaldo.
But that goal certainly was one — not one of the spectacular ones from the furthest corners of the field that goes straight to his YouTube highlight reel, but one of the countless tap-ins and headers that have, over the years, proved to be his bread and butter. As Joao Moutinho whipped in a cross off Bernardo Silva’s short corner, Ronaldo first ran straight, then to his left — shaking off his marker in the process — and then powered through an unstoppable diving header. His World Cup is only a couple of games old but Ronaldo has now scored off his right foot, left foot and from a header. His goals have come from open play, from a free-kick and from a penalty.
When the referee blew his whistle, Ronaldo put on his brightest smile and waited in the centre of the field, fully aware every single camera was now trained on him. One can only imagine that he feels more at home with Portugal than he does with Real Madrid. Unlike the Galacticos, there is no one to challenge his position as the top dog here. Without him, this team would truly be lost.