By Stuart James
In the end, it was the 40-year-old man who was crying. Not the child with the runners-up medal.
They were tears of joy as Cristiano Ronaldo, overcome with emotion, dropped to his knees after Ruben Neves converted the penalty that won Portugal the UEFA Nations League for the second time in six years. Love him or loathe him, Ronaldo has a magnetic attraction to silverware, and nothing gives him greater satisfaction than success with his country.
His third trophy with Portugal — there’s also the 2016 European Championship — was won on a night when the subplot involving him and opponent Lamine Yamal was too good to ignore.
Comparing players across different generations is always difficult, especially when the game changes so much over time. But what about when two great players of different generations end up playing in the same game?
“One is coming in and another is exiting the stage. If you want to see me as another generation, then that’s OK,” Ronaldo said on the eve of Sunday’s final against Spain in the German city of Munich.
It’s hard to see Ronaldo any other way when Yamal is on the pitch with him. Yamal, after all, is 17 years old. Ronaldo is 40. Yamal’s father is younger than Ronaldo, and Yamal is only three years older than Ronaldo’s eldest son, Cristiano Jr, who plays for Portugal at under-15s level.
A 23-year age gap between players on the pitch is unprecedented at a level of the game where fortysomethings are typically enjoying retirement or management and 17-year-olds are usually nowhere to be seen. That said, there’s nothing about either Ronaldo or Yamal that’s typical.
One of them belongs near the top of any conversation about the greatest ever footballers (“I am the best in history,” Ronaldo told journalist Edu Aguirre in February). The other is a teenage phenomenon who is one of the leading contenders for the Ballon d’Or at an age when he still isn’t old enough to legally drive a car in Spain.
“Two galaxies colliding” was the headline above the preview for Sunday’s match in the Spanish newspaper Marca.
Ultimately, though, it was a 22-year-old left-back who played on the night like he was on another planet.
Nuno Mendes, the Portugal and Paris Saint-Germain defender, was the best player on the pitch by a distance, so much so that he did more to shape the narrative around the Ronaldo and Yamal contest than anyone else, including both of them. After scoring Portugal’s first equaliser with a powerful angled drive, Mendes set up their second, which Ronaldo converted to register his 138th goal for his country in 221 caps.
Either side of those two goals, Mendes was outstanding up against Yamal, handling the Barcelona winger as well as — if not better — than anyone we have seen up until now.
Yamal was withdrawn at the interval in the 30 minutes of extra time, by which point he had spent longer chasing Mendes than Mendes had spent chasing him. Quite simply, it wasn’t Yamal’s day, and you got the feeling that it might turn out that way as early as the fourth minute, when Ronaldo, of all people, dispossessed him and launched a Portugal counter-attack.
There’s no need for a post-mortem into where it all went wrong for Yamal. He’s still a kid. In fact, maybe we already expect too much from him and assume he will be brilliant every time he sets foot on the pitch, just as he was against France in the semi-final in Stuttgart on Thursday. That, however, is not how elite football works.
The 17-year-old was at his rampant best in Spain’s 5-4 win vs France — but it was his second goal that gave a glimpse of how unusual he is
“Let him grow, do not put him under pressure, so we can enjoy a talent like this for many years,” Ronaldo warned beforehand.
How much longer we will enjoy Ronaldo’s talent is anyone’s guess.
In the eyes of many, he has been out of sight and out of mind ever since leaving Manchester United in December 2022 to sign for the Saudi Pro League side Al Nassr.
For Portugal, however, he remains a permanent fixture in their starting line-up and you get the feeling that will continue to be the case until the day he decides otherwise, rather than any manager.
Against Spain, he only touched the ball 22 times in his 88 minutes on the pitch and registered just that one shot.
In fact, he was on the periphery of the game for its first hour and generally making little in the way of a meaningful contribution, to the point that you briefly found yourself wondering whether Roberto Martinez, the Portugal coach, would have the courage and conviction to substitute his captain in search of some more dynamic movement up front and the second equaliser they badly needed.
That thought didn’t last long. Or, to put it another way, it lasted about as long as it took Mendes to sprint away from Yamal on the Portugal left and deliver a deflected cross that looped up invitingly for Ronaldo. Although Marc Cucurella was close by, realistically there was only going to be one winner and Ronaldo volleyed home from close range.
The pace of old has gone now but the instinct to be in the right place at the right time when a chance comes along is as strong as ever.
