IT’S THE END OF AN ERA
First Messi, now Ronaldo as Portugal are sent packing by sizzling South Americans
WHEN all eyes were on his players leaping upon each other and screaming at their supporters in celebration of what was to become the winning goal, the Uruguay manager, Oscar Tabarez, struggled out of his dug-out at the Fisht Olympic Stadium, supported by a walking stick, his movements pained and jerking, and hobbled to the touchline to impart a message to a defender.
Age has withered him but the disease of the nervous system from which he is thought to be suffering has not diminished him and when he hobbled into the press conference after the match, the journalists who asked him questions called him ‘maestro’.
No one knows quite what his disease is because he will not talk about it. All anyone knows is that he refuses to bow to it and now he has led his team into the quarterfinals of the World Cup.
Age poses everyone questions in the end, even two of the greatest players who have ever graced the game and as time’s arrow flew hither and thither on the first day of the knock-out phase it carried Kylian Mbappe and made him run like the wind but it found weak spots in men who have hitherto seemed impervious to the destruction it can wreak.
Many had hoped this would be the day when Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi wrote new chapters in their World Cup histories and advanced with Portugal and Argentina to one last battle in the quarter-final in Nizhny Novgorod next weekend. But it did not happen.
Uruguay and France progressed instead. For the first time in the careers of both men, there was a sense that a chapter had closed.
Messi will be 35 by the time of the next World Cup in Qatar and Ronaldo will be 37 but as they came to terms with the elimination of their countries, they knew that they had failed to score a single goal in the knock-out phases of the World Cups they had played.It is unlikely they will be back. They are not used to ambitions being thwarted but success in the greatest tournament of all has eluded them both.
This was the day the baton passed. This was the day when players like Mbappe, Eden Hazard, Luka Modric, Romelu Lukaku, Philippe Coutinho and Isco became the players to watch.
Ronaldo and Messi have dismissed the pretenders to their hegemony for more than a decade and watched them fade away but they can do that no more. Let’s hope it is a long farewell but yesterday felt like the beginning of the end for them. It was almost as if they were two halves of an old couple, neither of whom could live after the other had gone.
First, it was Messi, vanquished by the teenage brilliance of Mbappe and France in Kazan, and then a few hours later and 1,200 miles to the south, it was Ronaldo, who tried to drag his team past Uruguay in Sochi and failed.
And so the tournament lost them both on the same day. Yet the tournament has been so good that it feels as if it may not miss them. It felt last night that Portugal’s 2-1 defeat by the shores of the Black Sea marked the second act of the changing of the guard in football’s superstar world order.
Ronaldo said afterwards that now was not the time to talk about his future but it is unlikely he will be in Qatar.
The two men played out their own private feud right until the bitter end. Even as their worlds crumbled around them, they were cocooned in the battle for supremacy that has defined football for so long.
As he walked out in Sochi, Ronaldo wore the goatee beard that is his barbed rejoinder to Messi’s advert where he posed with a goat. Both claim the title the Greatest Of All Time at the very moment when their star is about to wane.
And as they fought, it almost felt as if they had forgotten there are other players in this battle now, too. It is not just them.
They have triumphed together and dominated together for more than a decade and yesterday chunks of their career died together.
Earlier in the evening, Messi had done his utmost to haul his fractured, dysfunctional, misfiring Argentina side into the last eight but the superhuman feats he performs on a regular basis for Barcelona are on shorter rations at World Cups and France were simply too young and too good.
Amid the euphoria of watching such a vibrant French performance, there was something poignant about seeing Messi upstaged by Mbappe, whose speed and boldness were too much for Argentina’s habitually ragged defence to cope with.
Those searching for the heir to Messi and Ronaldo felt they did not have far to look.
Ronaldo hurtled into the game against Uruguay like a man on a mission.
He started with a couple of extravagant stepovers and after he had been the object of a particularly industrial foul from a Uruguay defender, he ran on to a short pass from Bernardo Silva and
hit a fierce low shot straight at Fernando Muslera.
But then in the seventh minute, Cavani collected the ball on the right and drilled a long ball out to the left to Suarez. Suarez was looking up to see where Cavani was even as he cut inside Ricardo and the former Liverpool player found him perfectly with a cross hit to the back post with pace and curl.
Cavani rose unmarked and headed the ball into the roof of the net.
Ronaldo did his best to rally his side, mainly by adopting a shoot-onsight policy, but Suarez was still orchestrating play more effectively for Uruguay. Midway through the half, he drew a clumsy foul from Jose Fonte 25 yards out and then lashed the free-kick low towards Rui Patricio’s bottom left-hand corner. Patricio dived full length to push it away. A few minutes later, Ronaldo finally got his own chance with the dead ball. Rodrigo Bentancur barged into Goncalo Guedes on the edge of the box and everyone knew this was prime Ronaldo territory. Everyone knew this was roughly where he had scored the equaliser from in the dying minutes against Spain. He hitched up his shorts, his usual ritual, and then blasted the ball straight into the wall. Ten minutes after half-time, Portugal were level. When Raphael Guerreiro swung a cross over from the left, Ronaldo rose highest in the box but the ball was too high for him. As its trajectory grew lower, Pepe leapt behind Ronaldo and met the ball in the middle of his forehead, powering it past Muslera.
But parity did not last long. Five minutes later, Uruguay broke and spread the ball wide to Cavani on the left. Cavani made up his mind what he was going to do long before it reached him. He ran on to it, opened his body and curled the ball beyond Rui Patricio with his right foot.
It was a beautiful companion for his first goal.
Near the halfway line, Ronaldo looked to the heavens and threw his arms up in the air in that gesture of petulance that has become one of his less edifying trademarks.
Again and again he did it, as Uruguay celebrated far away in the corner, unable to understand how his team-mates could have let this happen to him.
They nearly dragged themselves back into the game a second time when Muslera came far, far off his line to try to claim a cross and dropped it.
He chased after it like a kid trying to catch a bouncy ball but Bernardo Silva nicked it away from him. Muslera was nowhere now but Silva could not control his shot, on his weaker right foot, and it climbed over the bar.
Ronaldo did his theatrical best to wrest an equaliser but it would not come. Almost his last act was to be booked. He would have missed the showdown with Messi anyway.
The little genius and the great showman departed the big show together, joined in their defeats just as they have been in their many, many triumphs.