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Journalism of Courage
He didn’t come to France to compete with the players of his generation but to seek a place among the best of the two millennia – this one and the coming one. If Romario, his predecessor, was subtlety, Ronaldo is exuberance. If Romario’s habitat was the penalty area, Ronaldo’s home would need to measure half the size of the pitch. If Romario is the past, Ronaldo’s almost cybernetic play belongs to the future.
The first time I saw him I spent the match bemoaning his play in vain: he would shrug his shoulders and set off on the solitary adventure of taking on defenders. Every time he touched the ball he hit it a long way – too far – in front of his feet and I, like every other spectator playing vicariously, always groaned for the same reason: "Ooh! it went too far". It looked like it was going out (ooh!), but he would reach it; it looked like the defender had the advantage (ooh!), but he’d get there; it looked like the keeper’s ball (ooh!), but it was a goal.
What happened was that I was measuring his speedin human terms and Ronaldo is a physical portent who throws assumptions about time and distance out of the window. He is a marvellous, strange body that hits the ball hard and accurately, heads badly and finds very effective solutions at close quarters.
Only inside the area, when space begins to be his enemy, does one discover that his speed is also mental and that he hides a cool skill for finding space for a shot. In reality, Ronaldo plays to shoot and his power is, after all, overwhelming. He searches for the ball, receives it and from that moment his only objective is the opposition goal. It’s a case of a soloist who doesn’t think about the game,only the goal. He sometimes gives the sensation that he’s playing for Nike, not for Brazil.
Nobody has his unbalancing capacity; even when he sets off 50 metres from goal he intimidates as if he were not just a man but a mob. But this obsession with bearing down on goal, whether the conditions exist or not, bothers me. On the expanse of a ranch he would beuncontainable but in tight spaces there’s no time to get up speed (no one is quick inside a lift). In those cases he would do better to control the ball and look for the empty space, because even footballrs from another planet have to respect the simple laws of this game.
Ronaldo never forms partnerships. The company of another forward seems to interfere with his obligatory slalom; in fact at Barcelona and at Inter he has always played as a lone ranger with the creative support of De la Pena or Djorkaeff. The landscape is always the same: his team-mates find him with the ball and he begins his personal adventure which divorces him from the team.
Anyone who saw Pele lay off 10 balls in succession first time began to doubt whether he was as great he was made out to be, and when the imagination was thinking up such nonsense as "and this is Pele . . ?" he would conjure up a goal out of nothing, drawing on his talent but also using surprise, because having disguised himself as an ordinary player for a fewminutes he had managed to lower the opposition’s guard.
Ronaldo is a boxer who always wants to land the knockout punch. Even if he manages to do so, someone should tell him that this is a bad way of boxing. In France ’98 he is the only one with the right to seek a definitive place alongside Maradona, but so far he has not found it.
The best player in the world is still playing badly even though he is winning matches for Brazil.
Jorge Valdano, former Argentine star, was a member of the 1986 winning team.
