World Cup 2018: How a missed penalty and personal feud reminded us all Cristiano Ronaldo is just another player

This was no ordinary game for Ronaldo who finally failed to deliver at this tournament, reminding us all that he can have poor games just like any other player

Even Portugal head coach Fernando Santos no longer bothers to pretend that Cristiano Ronaldo is just another player.

“Cristiano is like a port wine,” Santos said after the narrow 1-0 victory over Morocco, practically smacking his lips. “He knows how to refine his capacity and age at his best. He is constantly evolving, contradictorily to the other players. What he does now is not what he did three or four years ago, and not what he will be doing in a few years from now.”

That’s all true, of course. Ronaldo is getting better with age. He is the exception to the rule. And like a glass of strong port, his self-aware and all-consuming brilliance can sometimes prove a little difficult to stomach.

But to simply lap up Ronaldo’s carousel of achievements with a slack-jawed smile and the explanation that he’s unexplainable – some freakish force of nature – is to ignore the fact that, when you strip away the preening and the showboating and all those match-winning moments, Ronaldo is just another player, as his performance in last night's 1-1 draw proved.

He’s human. He still has days when he struggles to find that pocket of space in the box, when the ball just won’t go in and he fluffs his lines from the penalty spot. He still feels that soup of nerves and exhilaration deep in his belly in the moments before every kick-off. And he can definitely – definitely – still feel the heavy weight of a nation’s expectation every time he takes to the field for Portugal. The same weight of expectation that crushed Mohamed Salah. Crushed Son Heung-min. Yes: crushed even Lionel Messi.

Even a player who delivers quite as mechanically as Ronaldo finds themselves playing in games when the subtext can threaten to ride roughshod over the central narrative: where there is an edge, a score to be settled, an extra reason to be nervous. Portugal’s game against Iran this evening was one such occasion – a game that Ronaldo wanted so desperately to win not only because it would take his side through to the knockout stages, but because it was personal.

First there was the trivial. On the night before the game Iran’s supporters decided to stage an impromptu party directly outside the Portugal team hotel. Cue a grainy video emerging of Ronaldo’s silhouette emerging from the darkness, pleading with the singing supporters to quieten down before sauntering away with a thumbs up and a wave. Eventually the local police were called to quell the disruption.

However there is another – better – reason why this game carried an extra edge for Ronaldo. Something entirely unrelated to mischievous Iranians who took an extra eight years to catch onto the vuvuzela. And that is because of the reunion with Iran head coach Carlos Queiroz: previously one of Ronaldo’s closest associates at first Manchester United and then the Portuguese national team, before things turned very sour, very quickly.

In the beginning, Queiroz and Sir Alex Ferguson were equally close to Ronaldo, who famously struggled to adapt to life in Manchester and suffered the loss of his father not long after joining the club. “In the early days, I accept, he showboated a lot, and Carlos worked hard on that part of his repertoire,” Ferguson wrote of the pair’s relationship in his 2013 autobiography. “Carlos looked after Ronaldo, who was as you would expect from a young man with a dying father. If he couldn’t ask for help from Carlos, who could he seek if from?”

It was not Cristiano Ronaldo's night (Getty)

So close were the pair that United striker Ruud van Nistelrooy even dismissively referred to Queiroz as Ronaldo’s “dad”. But the pair’s famously strong relationship suffered when they were reunited on international duty. Ronaldo abhorred Queiroz’s defensive approach as head coach – scoring just a single goal in sixteen months of poor performances ahead of the 2010 World Cup – and hostilities moved out into the open after a last-16 defeat by Spain in Cape Town.

“Ask Queiroz,” Ronaldo spat when quizzed about the reasons for Portugal’s loss. “We didn't speak after that,” the manager later admitted. “I would be a hypocrite if I said that I liked his comments.”

This was then the subplot that rumbled beneath the surface in Saransk: the reason for that extra degree of tension. Incidentally, it was also the first game at this tournament that Ronaldo did not deliver. He made a bright enough start – taking less than three minutes to bluster his way into the box and thump a shot against Alireza Beiranvand – but faded thereafter, frantically shifting around the pitch but struggling to make an impression.

Carlos Queiroz cut an animated figure on the touchline (Getty)

There was even that missed penalty, as he spurned the opportunity to join leading scorer Harry Kane on five goals for the tournament. It was a poor strike, at a nice height for Beiranvand who dived confidently to his left, and gave Ronaldo the unwanted honour of becoming the first Portuguese player to miss a penalty kick at a World Cup.

And throughout there was the bad blood with Queiroz – which hasn’t gone anywhere after eight long years. Late on, Ronaldo almost found himself sent off for lightly pushing Morteza Pouraliganji, who collapsed to the turf as though he had been shot. After consulting the pitch-side screen the referee eventually decided to show Ronaldo a yellow, but throughout his deliberations there was Queiroz, campaigning furiously for a red.

Perhaps fittingly then neither man truly got the last laugh on an irascible evening that saw Ronaldo fluff his lines and flirt with disaster, Portugal slip to second behind Spain and Queiroz’s well-drilled side tumble out of the tournament at the first opportunity.

He was almost sent off late on (Getty)

And if anything this match served as a reminder that, yes, Ronaldo is human and no, perhaps he will not be able to carry Portugal through this tournament by sheer strength of will alone.