We'll get James Lawton out of the way straight away. I'll just quote this:
Good riddance to so much of what Cristiano Ronaldo became but then, of course, more regrets than we can comfortably list here that the best of him, at least as far as Manchester United were concerned, had gone some time before they publicly accepted yesterday the £80m offer of Real Madrid.It's just that middle bit, that "more regrets than we can comfortably list", that troubles me. Why can't he list them? Because he's going to spend the rest of the article slagging off Ronaldo, not because of physical space, but because James Lawton has decided to write a different article, not an article concentrating on the beauty of Ronaldo's play, but on the odd moment of petulance. The rest of the article is crap.
Daniel Taylor has a better piece, balancing the good and the bad:
Ronaldo's performances in Europe over the last two seasons guarantee that he can leave Old Trafford having shaken off the allegation that his best work came exclusively against the smaller clubs. There was the time, for example, when he traumatised Bolton (again) so badly that his marker, Henrik Pedersen, was substituted after 28 minutes. Afterwards a reporter asked Sam Allardyce, the Bolton manager at the time, if such an experience could leave his defenders with psychological scars. "Scars?" he replied. "We're going to need a fucking plastic surgeon after that."That destructive level of performance had become the norm, rather than the exception, once Ronaldo started playing with an adult intelligence about when to pass the ball, when to shoot and when to try his tricks. Yet it has been a strangely uneasy alliance at timesRichard Williams is also better (than James Lawton) looking at the bad, and good on the mistake Ronaldo is making:
the abiding memory of his final season may be of his body language – the strops, the apparent sense that the whole of English football was against him. It is difficult to pinpoint when this disillusionment began, but it did and it has seemed irreversible ever since Ronaldo started to dare take on Ferguson in view of the television cameras. In short, he has stopped looking comfortable in the red of Manchester United.
David Beckham discovered the limits of Fergie's tolerance for self-promotion when the manager kicked a boot that struck him above the eye and then sold him to Real Madrid. What is Spain's greatest club: a dumping ground for Ferguson's rejects and rebels?And he uses the Cantona comparison well:United are a collective where a siege mentality prevails. Real Madrid, on the other hand, ooze individual glamour. From the great title-winning sides of Puskas and Di Stefano, they have chased the game's real aristocrats. Their Bernabéu stadium is the round-ball Prado. These days, commerce drives them on. With Kaká and Ronaldo in harness, Real shoot back to the top of the international glitter league, acquiring huge new earning potential in far-off markets.
This magnetism exerted an inexorable pull on Ronaldo, who craved the heat and light of Iberia, where he first emerged with Sporting Lisbon, as well as Madrid's pristine all-white kit. He joins a team eclipsed by the brilliance of Barcelona.
Simon Barnes is also good (James Lawton should learn some lessons from these people:With consummate stagecraft, Cantona simply rose and left. He obeyed the voice that said his powers had waned to the point where he could no longer feel invincible pulling on the red shirt. There was no "better" place to go, unless you count beach football and the movies.
Looking for Eric, the Ken Loach film starring Cantona, opens today, and United fans will flood to cinemas for solace. Looking for Cristiano? Try Spain.
Farewell, Cristiano. It's been great. Well, it hasn't, actually. But it's been nearly great and that's almost as good, isn't it? And as Ronaldo turns his back on a great team with a great manager and goes off to join The Me Show at Real Madrid, we can reflect on a man who has greatness within him but cannot face up to the implications.
He brought us brilliance and, with it, a perfectly astounding silliness. He brought us extraordinary courage, he also brought us a vanity so intense that it inspired physical revulsion. He made himself both a star and a laughing stock.
I also like his comparison with "the greats":
He is the most skilful footballer on the planet, yet he is just as famous for hair gel and chest wax. He has created some stunning victories, but at their high point it has almost always been himself that he has celebrated. He is football's Narcissus, for ever peering into the pool of sporting history to admire only his own reflection.
He has the seeds of greatness in him, but I have my doubts about germination. Pelé, Maradona, Cruyff, Beckenbauer: where does Ronaldo fit in with this quartet of greatness? He doesn't, and nor is he likely to. He has chosen to swap the discipline and purpose of Sir Alex Ferguson's Manchester United to be indulged and idolised at Real, at the whim of the megalomaniacal president.
Which I find interesting - Ronaldo as a postmodern icon - whereas the great players he mentioned simply got on with being great on the football pitch, Ronaldo watched his own greatness. The intertextuality and self-referential nature of postmodern art expressed in footballing form. We can see this in Ronaldo's desire to be the most expensive footballer ever, not just the best but the most expensive, showing a bizarre level of self-awareness - see his statement: "the deal is historic. £80 million is quite a sum of money".
Oliver Holt has the by now standard good/bad thing, but makes a good point in the midst:
Henry Winter looks ahead:But even if Sir Alex Ferguson is allowed to invest all the £80m from his sale in the purchase of new players, United will be a poorer team without Ronaldo.
The sad thing is that Ronaldo will almost certainly be a poorer player without United, too. At Old Trafford, he had men like Wayne Rooney and Carlos Tevez who were willing to run themselves into the ground for the team and leave the glory to Ronaldo.
The Big Red Machine will roll on. Tactically, Ferguson can tighten his attack by pairing Rooney and Dimitar Berbatov through the middle.Oliver Kay cuts through much of the rubbish:Berbatov deserves a chance to bed in to a partnership while Rooney showed against Andorra the reign of terror he can unleash if used centrally. Rooney must be given centre-stage.
If Antonio Valencia is added, United will have pace and penetration on the right. If Ferguson can turn his passion for Lyon’sx Karim Benzema into a meaningful relationship, using probably half the Ronaldo booty, then United will not lose their prolific nature.
Even if Gary Neville, Scholes and Giggs are winding down, even if Fraizer Campbell is heading for pastures new, the champions’ squad remains impressive. As for the first XI, Ferguson could start next season in 4-2-3-1 formation with Foster; Rafael, Ferdinand, Vidic, Evra; Carrick, Fletcher; Valencia, Berbatov, Rooney; Benzema. Not bad. And Ferguson would still have £25 million left over from the Ronaldo cash.
When it came down to it, after all the bluster had subsided, it was an offer that Manchester United could not refuse. David Gill, the chief executive, scrutinised the numbers on the fax and immediately called Sir Alex Ferguson, who digested the figures and said what they both knew, which was that the time had come to sell the World Player of the Year.Martin Samuel also cuts through the crap, but in a more depressing way:
Six months earlier Ferguson had infamously said of Real Madrid that he “wouldn’t sell that mob a virus”, never mind Cristiano Ronaldo. Six months before that, when Ronaldo was pleading to be allowed to follow his dream, Ferguson had suggested that Real would have to climb over his dead body before he agreed to sell. Rewind another six months and Gill, a man not known for shooting from the lip, was saying “you can’t sell players like Cristiano — it wouldn’t make sense”. But when he and Ferguson were faced with a mind-boggling offer of £80 million on Wednesday night, it suddenly did make sense.
A match-winning virus, a free-kick taking virus, a virus that propelled one club back to the pinnacle of English, European and world football. Symptoms: extraordinary goals from outlandish range, courageous headers, wonder dribbles, invention, imagination and a deadball technique that redefined the art.Patrick Barclay has a similar article which I won't quote.
Yes, the money, £80million, is good, but it needs to be. United have traded their main man to a serious rival. There is no precedent for this, no moment in history to call upon and place the transfer of Cristiano Ronaldo in comforting context. ‘Remember when we sold the best player in the world, and it made us stronger?’ No, because that never happens. Never has and never will. ...
Ferguson kept Ronaldo for as long as he could and, exasperated that there was no resolution to his yearning for a move to Real Madrid, reluctantly agreed a sale. That does not mean he has a guaranteed answer to the problem of his replacement, though; more that he finally realised keeping him at Old Trafford against his will was no way forward. ...
Something changed to alter his mind-set. Too many vague answers about Ronaldo’s future, perhaps, too many sentences left dangling. Maybe Ferguson recalled the havoc that the uncertainty around Patrick Vieira and Thierry Henry had wreaked at Arsenal. It would not have been simply the carrot of £80m. Ferguson knows he could spend every penny of that and not bring 67 goals in two seasons to his club. ...
Lionel Messi may be about to steal his individual crown, but Ronaldo’s performance against Arsenal at the Emirates Stadium last month suggests there could be a few more rounds in this prize fight yet.
It is quite possible that the 42-goal season is not the peak of Ronaldo’s career, that he
might be inspired to fresh heights at his beloved Madrid. If he is, with Barcelona also in the ascendancy, United could again be relegated to also-ran status in the Champions League, as happened soon after their triumph in 1999. These are troubling times.
Richard Williams has an article full of praise, the reading of which is making me miss Ronaldo even more:
Jamie Redknapp tells it like it is:When he arrived in England he was already making frequent use of the step‑over, a technique that looks extravagant even when used for a genuine purpose. Ronaldo needed so little excuse to perform double and triple step-overs that he was soon accused of being a show pony – a charge that his high-stepping gait and concern with personal grooming did nothing to undermine. What happened next, however, was that he learnt how to use his tricks economically, so that each one counted.
Gradually he became less prone to the temptation to use them merely to humiliate opponents who had been hacking at his heels or tugging his shirt. He was probably the only man in world football who could link a Cruyff turn and a Zidane roulette in the same fluid move, and make the combination do the damage he intended. Then there was his patented double bluff: that astonishing trick of back-heeling the ball with his left foot on to his right instep so that his opponent, having reacted to the initial gesture, was bamboozled when the ball ricocheted back in the direction in which Ronaldo had originally been moving.
It was the speed at which he did all this that made him so formidable. The runs were spring-heeled, the changes of direction instant, the passes pinged away at all angles with a pace that asked a lot of his team-mates' ball control. It was a challenge they were happy to accept.
The Telegraph have details on the machinations of the deal, where the detail comes from, who knows, but it contains this interesting bit:I spoke to Liverpool’s Jamie Carragher on Thursday. Like the players at Chelsea and Arsenal, Carragher and his Anfield team-mates are celebrating over the dramatic news from Old Trafford.
No more chief tormentor to worry about, at least not in the Barclays Premier League.
Contingency plans have been made. For weeks United have been trying to secure an agreement to sign Bayern Munich's Franck Ribery, while there have been discussions concerning Wigan's Antonio Valencia for even longer.The Mail suggest elsewhere that we will face competition though:It appears that, as part of the Ronaldo deal, Real have stepped aside in the pursuit of Ribery.
It is, however, the prospect of United going head to head with Chelsea for Bayern Munich’s Ribery that looks the most mouthwatering, and the suggestion from Stamford Bridge last night was that the London club certainly expect their rivals to be involved.In an article about the "exodus" from Old Trafford (Ronaldo, maybe Tevez, is an exodus?!), The Times say that Barcelona want Vidic:
Vidic’s wife, Ana, is growing increasingly unsettled in Manchester and wants to move to a warmer climate. Pep Guardiola, the Barcelona coach, is hoping to exploit the situation by making a £25 million bid for the Serbia defender.Two silly comments from silly people in The Guardian, Michel Platini:
Well, there's been two this week I guess, but a larger sample would probably be needed before one could claim that they're "happening almost everyday"..."These excessive transfers are happening almost every day," said Platini. "[They] represent a serious challenge to the idea of fair play and the concept of financial balance in our competitions.
"Uefa is working hard with clubs to establish a new set of rules as soon as is possible to clean up the system and give it a more solid and more transparent base. That is our top priority."
Gerry Sutcliffe, who is the Sports Minister apparently, is pretty patronising about "ordinary people":
What a twat. The working-class have a problem with figures? Arsehole."These are astronomical figures," he said, "and from the wider perspective this transfer, added to the one of Kaka, continues to give us cause for concern. Competitive balance is not just a UK issue now, it's a European issue especially since Florentino Pérez is bringing the galácticos back to Real Madrid.
"These figures are simply beyond the understanding of most ordinary fans.
Finally, Ronaldo and Paris Hilton, a match made in heaven:
Paris, 28, last night confirmed she and the Portuguese wonder winger - now the world's most expensive player - were an item.
She told a pal: "He's hot, a real athlete - and the chemistry between us was electric."
The American party girl hitched up with Ronaldo just 24 hours after dumping previous love DOUG REINHARDT.
He has played baseball for the Anaheim Angels and Baltimore Orioles - and is a TV personality in the States.
But in a withering put-down last night, Paris told a friend: "Cristiano's much better than my ex. He was nothing but a low-paid minor league baseball player." ..."Cristiano told Paris all about his new deal with Real Madrid and they toasted his massive new pay packet with Cristal champagne."
A bottle of Cristal can cost up to £650. And the club source said Ronaldo spent more than £15,000 on the bubbly and other drinks.
An onlooker said: "Ronaldo and Paris were all over each other, kissing in a VIP booth. They were kissing on the lips and meeting people as a couple, holding hands or with his arm around her. Her hands were all over his lap. There was a lot of very suggestive body language.
"They looked adorable together. It was as though they'd been dating for ages. He was reclined all the way back in a chair with his legs spread wide open. It looked almost pornographic.
"Paris's black minidress was getting higher and higher as the night wore on. At one point people on a neighbouring table threw silver confetti at them. A bunch stuck to Paris's upper thigh, which she draped over Ronaldo's lap."
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