You can’t fight it. You can criticize its style. You can complain about its sportsmanship. But the fire-bomb is coming. The roof of your house is going to be shattered, and your walls are going to light up. From far off it will look like a match being struck, then black smoke will swallow up the stars.
Cristiano Ronaldo has played football this year with frequent periodic eruptions of a skill that no other player can equal. There are statistics that say so, and there are things you’ve seen with your own eyes. He’s broken George Best’s scoring mark. He’s gotten 36 goals as a winger—10 in his last 11 European games. He’s scored one of the best free kicks ever. Yesterday against Roma he rioted up the pitch, scored a leaping header from nowhere, and incinerated the curtains of the entire Roma team. He rains down, and the neighborhoods get grim. It’s a small miracle, worth noting on the tourist literature, that he hasn’t blown up St. Paul’s.
I still have reservations about the way he plays. There’s a theme-park light-show quality to it, like so many stuttering lasers have been layered across the ceiling that you can barely pick out the Pink Floyd song underneath. But it’s hard to fault a player for being all flash when he’s clearly the difference between his team being an accomplished side with a few pieces missing and their being, on a good day, the strongest team in football. Even Johan Cruyff says he’s the best player in the world.
Liverpool are a science project in a lab with no beakers. Arsenal are a brilliant little snow globe for Christmas. Chelsea are a diplomatic conflict in search of a diplomat. Manchester United are a great team, and it’s Ronaldo—not single-handedly, but a lot more single-handedly than almost anyone else you could say this about—who’s made them one.
Who would you trade him for? Swap him with any other very good winger, and Man Utd look like an aging team struggling to integrate their younger stars. Alex Ferguson’s ugly little secret is that a lot of his recent signings haven’t worked out all that well—Carrick has been dull, Hargreaves doubly dull given all the work he cost them; Anderson wishes he’d been dull; Nani’s looked talented only in the rare moments when his eyes have cleared and he’s understood that he isn’t the walking epicenter of English football. Even Tevez, as sharp as he’s looked at times, is sometimes out of touch with the flow of the game.
Ronaldo, somehow, knits this side together and makes it work. It’s an unbalanced, even awkward team tactically—no side that’s scoring 40% of its goals from the wing is exactly a triumph of pure formation—but Ronaldo has played so well that concerns like that really just don’t matter. His assist total is down from last season, but he touches the ball on a lot of possessions that end in teammates’ goals, and the panic he causes wherever he moves on the pitch creates a lot of openings. Scholes, at times, seems to live in the calm on his fringes.
Maybe without him Rooney would have developed more quickly and gotten 15 goals this year. But he’s often made Rooney look better than he is, and maybe more importantly, he’s provided such a blinding focal point for everyone watching the team that Rooney has been able to go through his occasional dips in form without having to endure much scrutiny.
Man Utd still have to play at Stamford Bridge, but assuming Chelsea are too bogged down in their own problems to do anything quite as grand as win the title, it’s hard to see anyone stopping Man Utd. Who else do they play? Arsenal at Old Trafford, in what could be a huge match (though probably not for Arsenal). Other than that, just houses, and it looks like a roar and a siren from now till the end of the season.
UPDATE: Martha has a great analysis of the state of United here. Take a look!
Read More: Cristiano Ronaldo, Manchester United, The Edge of the End
by Brian Phillips · April 2, 2008
I’ve been trying to write a United post in my head, but Ronaldo keeps getting in the way. Hate them (him) all you want, what they’re doing works (and works is all they do). It’s hard to admit, but man are they good.
A well-written piece and mostly accurate (the big picture is good, the details a bit fuzzy).
I would point out though, that in the effort to paint an effective contrast between Ronaldo and his teammates, you’ve pretty much shat on Carrick’s role for last season and his resurgence this season.
Hargo – injury-stricken for most of the season, and has been dynamic and effective whenever he’s been on.
Nani and Anderson – they’ve had some very good games, which is about all you can expect from a ‘first season’. Remember Ronaldo’s?
A bit on fergie’s tactics, if you’re interested.
Martha — I’m not sure about the post you wrote in your head, but the post you wrote on your blog was terrific—I’ve added a link above.
Ahmed — I agree about Nani and Anderson, who are both going to be very good in a few years, though they’re too erratic to be real assets this year. I should have been more clear about that. The larger point is still that their inconsistency would stand a real chance of hurting the team if Ronaldo weren’t playing so brilliantly.
Not sure I can agree on Carrick and Hargreaves. Except for odd flashes, I haven’t seen Carrick be anything more than functional, and Hargreaves has been worse than Carrick. (Why was he left out yesterday till after halftime, for instance?) You’ve surely seen more United games than I have this year, though, so maybe I’ve just caught the wrong ones.
Thanks a lot Brian, you’re way, way too kind.
I did what blaugrana socios are supposed to do and watched the Barca match Tuesday night.
I’ve been hiding under the bed since, peaking out every now and then in the vain hope that Leo Messi will magically appear and spirit us away from the approaching danger.
After having seen our defense repeatedly shredded in consecutive matches by the likes of Betis and Schalke, I am reduced to hoping that Ronaldo and friends will fall over themselves laughing at our ineptitude or somehow be moved to mercy.
Or perhaps Puyol can manage to get a mirror onto the pitch. That’s the one thing that will always stop C. Ronaldo.
Ursus, I think even Ronaldo would vouch for the effectiveness of the mirror defense. “The only person who can stop Ronaldo…is Ronaldo,” he’d say, twirling his imaginary moustache.
Puyol should look into this.
Very good article and great vision creating words.
However, I think you underestimate the rest of the United team. Maybe an injury to Ronaldo would have (maybe still will) cost United the title this season.
Or maybe Nani would have played more often and produced more. Carrick and Scholes, at Premier League level, still produce the passes to win most games. Rooney and Tevez would have played more often together.
Maybe without Ronaldo, Fergie would have bought that missing striker in the January transfer window?
And the defence have been immense this season. For all the goals Ronaldo scored, the defence is the thing that kept us in it at the start of the season
Malcolm Gladwell had a piece in the New Yorker a couple of years back, where he wrote about this book called The Wages of Wins. The book, through statistical analysis of basketball players, argued that Allen Iverson, in his MVP-winning 2000-2001 season, was the 36th best player in the league, at least according to the algorithm they created, which is supposed to be more representative of how essential a player was to his team’s wins. In other words, it’s not just baskets (or goals) that matters, it’s how much a player contributes to the final result in all aspects.
Here’s the link:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/05/29/060529crbo_books1
I wonder how this applies to soccer. Anyone would be remiss if they suggested Ronaldo was not the key to United’s success this year. And in soccer, where the scores are so low, maybe it is the guys who put the ball in the net who would come out on top. It all depends on how different aspects are valued: if we created a soccer algorithm, how many points would a goal be worth versus a goal-saving tackle in the box? etc.
nice read.
if c ronaldo isn`t a one man team, he is definitely the centre of attention.
anybody else in this man u team is a much smaller part of the story. vidic, a rejuvenated ferdinand, rooney … its all about c. ronaldo.
interesting point, about his goal tally even though he is a winger. i think he is now a go-whereever-he-wants-to-er. that last game of his against villa, he lobbed in a cross for tevez from a traditional wing position. but those two passes for rooney`s goals, he was in the middle of the park.
hehe, when you are playing this well, you can go where you want, and do what you want. that back heel goal.
I’m a neutral who has been following Arsenal all year and I have to say that I think that Ferguson’s recent acquisitions have been his best ever. I think that what is happening for you is that you are comparing the great new players with The Best Player in the World when there is no comparison. It’s unfair to compare the likes of a Tevez for instance with Ronaldo. Yet Tevez, like Carrick and Anderson and all, have turned this United side into the most talented Sir Alex has ever had. Ronaldo has been in such rare form that I think now that even with Vidic (their second most important player) out, they can win the double.
Yes he scored from the header and hit the post late in the game but apart from that all I saw against Roma was him losing the ball.
I would hardly call that ‘incineration’ but maybe that’s just me.
A., I take your point, but I can think of a lot of players who wouldn’t mind having an off night in which all they did was score the winning goal in a Champions League away game.
Melina, it’s an interesting question, the possibility of statistically quantifying games as fluid and non-situational as soccer and basketball. My brilliant brother-in-law writes for both Baseball Prospectus and Basketball Prospectus, the latter of which has done a lot of fascinating work on this very subject. We should have him on for a chat.
I remember being skeptical about that Wages of Wins book when it came out—it just seemed a little too perfectly suited to some trends in commercial publishing (the popularity of counterintuitive numbers-driven explanations after Freakonomics, the popularity of sabermetrics and complex stat modeling in baseball after Moneyball, etc.) to be really impartial, I thought. I haven’t read it, though, so I could be totally wrong.
My own take is that soccer fans probably do tend to overrate goalscoring as part of a player’s overall contribution to a team. But once we have that realization, it probably becomes pretty easy to underrate it, and to say about Ronaldo, instance, “Well, all he does is score goals.” Scoring goals is still really important! And when a player approaches 40 on a season (a mark Ronaldo will almost certainly pass this year) for a team that’s won as much as Man Utd, the question of whether the accomplishment is overvalued is probably a bit academic.
I was—and am—also skeptical about the book, though I haven’t read it either. (That it was Gladwell, king of counterintuitive theories, who wrote the flattering review only furthers my skepticism.)
You’re right about Ronaldo—you can’t argue with his performance, whether you’re judging with your eyes or judging him with stats.
But I do think a player like Kaka, on the other hand, might be fooling us into thinking he’s better than he is (at least when it comes to getting wins) because he’s such a delight to watch. Not only does he score a lot of goals, but the goals he does score (and the plays he makes) are beautiful.
Creating goals is even more important than scoring them, IMO. When goal creating is combined with goal scoring , all in one move and when the game is in the balance, we can dispel doubts as to the effectiveness of the player. I’m
not trying to downplay Ronaldo’s contribution to Man, a team getting carried at least a little by their no. 7 but just trying to bring a certain perspective to it because I don’t think he has been as “good” as Kaka was last year:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HzC1QAB1YE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veW6VjmAcVM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnt0CX9VpHs&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sakCvzGeSK4&feature=related
You are a very fine writer, Brian but your analysis conflicts with mine. Oh hell, I think your thinking about United is all too typical. I just posted something on Martha’s blog. The essence of it? United are not a great TEAM. They are something entirely different. They are a spirit. They have a great, great collection of players and a charasmatic manager. But this is not a classical team. This is why United will never rival Milan. Fergie is not a tactician. But they have Ronaldo: that Friggin header at the Stadio Olympico was out of Shaolin Soccer, I’m sure of it. You might find this strange but everyone is talking about how United stroked the ball around in Rome last week but the Italians have that kind of techique and team flow in their sleep. United weren’t beautiful last week, they weren’t tight like an orchestra. They were only one thing, one thing only and it could give them the double: they were deadly. United is not a beautiful team, nor a well-designed team: they are simply a deadly team…and sometimes that is enough to get you into the history books…
Hey BP, just out of curiosity, how does what you just wrote conflict with my analysis? My post was all about how Ronaldo covers up the deficiencies in the Man Utd team and makes them deadly. Not trying to argue with you, it’s just that what you just wrote matches my own feeling about Utd pretty well (my post even mentions the tactical imbalance of Ferguson’s team design, which you highlight on Martha’s blog), so I’m wondering where you see the difference.
Maybe the problem is that you think I was too critical of the other United players, and what you’re saying is that they all have superb individual talent—i.e., it’s not just Ronaldo who overcomes their shortcomings in teamwork. I’d agree with that up to a point (I definitely don’t mean to suggest that the side isn’t full of extremely talented players), but I still can’t see them being where they are now without Ronaldo’s incredible goalscoring. It’s all just what-ifs at that point, though. Anyway, I think our opinions may not be all that far apart.
A. and Melina — Interesting stuff. I never know exactly what to make of Kaka. All those video clips are fantastic (the third one, the CL goal against Man Utd, gave me chills when I saw it at the time), but sometimes I think (along with Melina, maybe) that he’s a lot of gorgeous video highlights strung together with some fairly anonymous play. But it’s almost impossible to avoid the present-form bias (Utd are winning, so Ronaldo looks better) and the who-I’ve-seen-more-of bias (I’ve watched probably 25 Utd games this year and only 8-9 Milan games) so I’ll just say I’m glad they’re both around.
Brian, you’re right. Long day. Should read better, listen better, before getting all fired up about my little agendas. You’re right, we do mostly agree. Ronaldo is a huge factor to United’s success, as are a few other players. Cheers.