Ken Early: Cristiano Ronaldo’s decline leaves Portugal paying the price against Colombia

World Cup, Group K: Colombia 0 Portugal 0

It feels like I have been writing the same story about Cristiano Ronaldo forever. I was there in Qatar in 2022, when Ronaldo was dropped from the Portugal team for the second-round game against Switzerland. I remember how, during the pre-match rituals, all the photographers swarmed around the Portugal bench to record his pain.

His replacement, Gonçalo Ramos, scored a hat-trick and Portugal won 6-1. Portugal got knocked out in the next round by Morocco, neither Ramos nor the substitute Ronaldo able to score on the night, but that failed World Cup campaign, combined with the 37-year-old superstar’s move to Saudi Arabia, seemed an obvious punctuation point. It’s time to move on.

But Portugal decided to appoint as their new coach Roberto Martinez, the ex-Wigan and Everton manager who had just led Belgium to a dire group-stage exit in Qatar. And Martinez announced that in his view, age was just a number. Ronaldo would continue to lead the team.

I was there in Stuttgart in 2024, when Ronaldo, who had failed to score in his four Euro 24 games to that point, missed a penalty against Slovenia and burst into tears. (He later explained that he cried not because he felt his world was collapsing on itself, although that’s how it looked at the time, but because he was so disappointed to have finally missed a penalty after scoring his last 27 in a row.)

Portugal got through that match on penalties and Martinez kept faith with Ronaldo. But Ronaldo again failed to score in the quarter-final against France and Portugal went out on penalties. Another obvious punctuation point had been reached.

But Martinez continued to insist that Ronaldo was untouchable. He missed another penalty against Ireland in the qualifiers, then got sent off in the return match. I asked one of the Ireland players involved that night how Ronaldo’s suspension might affect Portugal in the World Cup – this was before Fifa announced his ban would be cut from three matches to one – and he answered immediately: “they’re better without him.”

But thanks to Roberto Martinez and Gianni Infantino, we may never find out. Let’s be clear. If you swapped the number 7s in this match between Portugal and Colombia – put Luis Diaz up front for Portugal, and Ronaldo on the wing for Colombia – Portugal would have won 4-0. They had a better player than Colombia in nearly every position, but right at what should be the sharp end of the team they had a guy who is playing because he is richer, more famous and more powerful than anyone else in Portuguese football.

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Of course Ronaldo has been a great player, the best Portuguese player of all time, but this situation has gone beyond the merely eccentric or amusing, and has become genuinely ugly. How can the international careers of top players like Vitinha and Bruno Fernandes be written off as collateral damage to the indulgence Ronaldo demands and, for whatever reason, is afforded?

The problem is obvious and here it is, in case Roberto Martinez is reading. Being 41 years old, Ronaldo finds it more difficult to get into positions to shoot, and on the increasingly rare occasions that he does, he often rushes his actions because he is expecting to be closed down.

There was a good example of this just before half-time, when Ronaldo received the ball 25 yards out with no Colombian near him. He turned and hit an instant shot with his left foot, straight into a defender. It didn’t look like the right decision in the moment, but it was the only decision that allowed him, with certainty, to try a shot at goal. The ball went up the other end as Ronaldo stood and watched from the Colombia half, and James Rodriguez drew a good save from Costa.

Another aspect of the same problem is that Ronaldo can no longer rely on his pace to tear away from defenders, so he tries to compensate with earlier, riskier runs. On 32 minutes a nice Portuguese build-up left Bruno Fernandes in space just inside the Colombia half, but by the time he could play the through-ball Ronaldo had already run fully five yards offside.

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Ronaldo emerged for the second half having changed his golden boots for pink ones, but his performance did not improve. Just after the hour mark there was a moment that combined both of his unfortunate new characteristics. Portugal broke forward with Joao Felix. Rather than go for goal himself, he paused and then played through to Ronaldo, who had catapulted through the defensive line and met the pass unmarked on the penalty spot. He had time to control and measure his finish but again he rushed the shot, and his mis-hit effort rolled slowly wide of the far post.

The linesman’s flag immediately confirmed that the only reason Ronaldo had found that much space in the penalty area to begin with was that he had run offside. But the flag could not erase the memory of the finish, and the Colombian fans made their derision clear.

Colombia’s 34-year-old legend James Rodriguez was substituted to a huge ovation on 75 minutes. The Colombians recognise that even their greatest players have their physical limits. That Colombia did not score was largely down to the VAR decision that denied Davinson Sanchez a 91st minute winner because his toe was offside. They had missed a few chances in the latter stages; it was their bad luck none of these chances fell to Diaz.

That Portugal did not score should not surprise anybody. Portugal have not scored in four of their last six tournament matches, two of which went all the way to penalties. Ronaldo started all of those matches. Martinez can pretend this is fine all he likes, but four nils in six games does not lie. If the coach is going to pick his team based on wealth and fame, Portugal might be as well off with Elon Musk up front. At least Musk wouldn’t run offside.

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