Sport | Football
Much ado about Ronaldo's gesture
If you want to be a top player, the saying goes, you must be prepared to break your grandmother's leg in a 50-50 challenge.
- By Naveed Raja, staff reporter
- Published: 00:00 July 5, 2006
If you want to be a top player, the saying goes, you must be prepared to break your grandmother's leg in a 50-50 challenge.
That's the example given to players to instil in them the need for ruthlessness and a bit of spite in their game which elevates them to the next level. Elevates Wayne Rooney for one.
Winning is everything to the players at the World Cup which makes the witch-hunt aimed at Cristiano Ronaldo for his role in the Wayne Rooney sending-off saga misplaced.
Here was the reaction of England's Steven Gerrard: "I saw Ronaldo. If it was one of my teammates I would be absolutely disgusted in him, because I saw Ronaldo going over to the referee and giving him the card and I think he was bang out of order.
"Winking at the bench and his teammates sums him up as a person, because if I was playing against my teammate at Liverpool and they were involved in a situation like that, I would never try and get them sent off."
Firstly, Ronaldo did not even wave an imaginary card. What he said to the referee is unknown. And would serial diver Gerrard perform a swan-lake impression over a Liverpool or England teammate's leg that may get him sent off? Without a moment's hesitation.
In the Chelsea-Manchester United game in which he got injured before the World Cup, Rooney flew in on John Terry with a shocking challenge that could have broken the centre-back's leg and put him out of the World Cup. Whose teammate was he then?
During the match, Ronaldo's teammate was Ricardo Carvalho, writhing in pain, not Rooney.
There was not much concern for Carvalho at the time from his Chelsea clubmates Terry, Frank Lampard or Joe Cole.
Ronaldo may get booed when he returns to Old Trafford but that will only be because he is thought to be trying to move to Real Madrid, not what happened in Gelsenkirchen.
Being a real football fan is not dressing up in a Brazil shirt every four years but following a team, however poor or good, through thick and thin.
The Old Trafford supporters know that and they still chant "Argentina" in support of David Beckham after the campaign waged against him after the 1998 World Cup.
The final word is Rooney's though: "I bear no ill feeling to Cristiano but am disappointed that he chose to get involved.
"I suppose I have to remember that on that particular occasion, we were not teammates."
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