By now the routine is familiar around the world, from Turin to Riyadh, Lisbon to Manchester. Team of Cristiano Ronaldo wins promising free-kick, Ronaldo steps up to take it, sets ball down carefully, strides back with purpose, adopts power stance, puffs out cheeks and begins his run up. Meanwhile, fans prepare for a forthcoming goal-kick.
The immovable object from Portugal’s national team has scored a respectable 52 direct free-kicks for his five clubs during a 22-year career. That is a rate of 2.4 per year, so while we are not talking about a specialist in the Sinisa Mihajlovic mould he is hardly some deranged set-piece megalomaniac.
It is when wearing Portuguese colours that things get less rosy for Ronaldo, especially in tournaments. Sixty direct free-kick attempts now from the 39-year-old at the World Cup and European Championship combined. A grand total of one scored.
In his defence the one successful dot you see above was outstanding, the equalising goal in a rip-roaring 3-3 opening group game draw with Spain at the 2018 World Cup. A deft unerring arrow into the top corner around 22 yards from goal. The perfect free-kick range, in other words.
Perhaps Ronaldo has been trying to prove this theory by showing how difficult it is to score from almost every other conceivable position? Amusing to note the trail of misses queuing up behind his solitary success, and tempting to imagine they took place in sequence, moving further away from goal each time while the world’s most stubborn man kept attempting to prove a pointless point.
The clutch of attempts to the far left of the box is particularly egregious. Who is scoring from there? Not Ronaldo, evidently. This was where his latest laughable attempt originated against Slovenia on Monday night, Ronaldo trying to beat a two-man wall and bypass the entirety of his team minus goalkeeper and approximately a fifth of the population of Slovenia.
That is not shooting range for anyone, I do not care if you are Ronaldo or Rogério Ceni. At this stage in his career Ronaldo should be shooting only from the penalty spot. Even from there it is only a 50 per cent success rate.
Because we are discussing Ronaldo we must compare him to the other fella. No I am not going to mention his name. Sometimes you have to put faith in the article and say search engine optimisation be damned. How does our small friend from Argentina get on with direct free-kicks in the World Cup and Euros analogue the Copa America?
Still a pretty rotten record of fewer than one in 10 scored, but also seven fewer attempts and a 400 per cent increase in success rate on Ronaldo. Also note the far saner spread of shot locations. Comparatively few from neighbouring boroughs.
Of course not everyone struggles to make a success of scoring free-kicks on the biggest stage. Move over, supposed world beaters, and make room for our 100 per cent success rate king Eric Dier, and his goal against Russia at Euro 2016.
Where is he in the GOAT discussions?
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