Ronaldo, the "Walker," and the Old Man of Restelo

This past Tuesday, June 23rd, a Portuguese miracle unfolded in Houston. The "statue" moved, and the captain indeed scored a goal just six minutes in. The way he celebrated alone made it clear how fed up his teammates are with his presence.

Immediately afterward, and clearly against his will – because Cristiano Ronaldo calls the shots and doesn't want his teammates to shine – Nuno Mendes took a free-kick and scored. The captain couldn't have been more annoyed; his frustration was so intense that he activated his "walker's turbo" and bagged a brace.

Of course, this was only possible because Uzbekistan is an inferior team. Clearly, if another player had been in the captain's position, we would have scored even more goals, perhaps ten.

After all, in a game like this, if he were truly good, he would have scored a hat-trick like Messi. Opportunities certainly weren't lacking. Not that he knew how to choose the correct positioning and movements, but he got lucky and still couldn't convert.

I haven't lost my mind writing this; in fact, the topic and much of the text were prepared even before Tuesday's game. Of course, the match against Uzbekistan allowed for more irony and content, as most of the phrases above are, unfortunately, inspired by many texts and comments I've read and heard.

Last week, a group of students asked me: "Professor, in this situation, what will Cristiano Ronaldo's psychological state be?" In 2025, I wrote an article in this very column titled: 'Cristiano Ronaldo: an example of a winning mindset,' and among other things, I wrote: "From early on, Cristiano Ronaldo seems to have embraced every challenge as an opportunity to grow. Even in the face of various criticisms, the athlete has demonstrated his resilience, both in his words and his actions on the field."

This is precisely what I based my answer to my students on: Cristiano Ronaldo's mindset allows him to react positively to this type of adversity, so it was expected that he could deliver this response.

My only concern was the context, the stage of his career he's in, which could potentially make him vulnerable. But Cristiano Ronaldo responded like Cristiano Ronaldo, and the entire national team responded with him. Because if he's never solely responsible for defeats, we should also look to the group for victories.

Cristiano Ronaldo is indeed a complete athlete, combining his physical and technical-tactical performance with a winning mindset. But what compels me to write this isn't our captain's mindset, but rather how society has been dealing with it, because this is starting to become disturbing.

Diogo Dalot stated this week, almost indignantly, that "there are countless people who don't want Portugal to win." The athlete and his statement were heavily criticized. But I understand; there are so many speeches from true prophets of doom. And perhaps this says more about us as a nation and collective identity than it does about Cristiano Ronaldo or the National Team.

In Portugal, there's a kind of collective "Old Man of Restelo," that disbelieving gaze Camões so well immortalized in *The Lusiads*, always ready to announce the fall even before the journey begins. Coupled with it is a certain melancholy of Fado, that almost cultural familiarity with sadness, loss, and announced misfortune, a true romanticization of suffering.

We want to win, of course we do; after all, the country stops to watch the National Team. But often, we seem to do so with our bodies leaning towards defeat, as if we're always waiting for something to go wrong to confirm our own narrative.

And when things go wrong, there isn't just sadness: there's almost a strange comfort in saying, "I knew it." But perhaps there's something even more unsettling here than the Old Man of Restelo or the melancholy of Fado. Because one thing is the almost cultural tendency to expect a downfall; another, quite different, is to seem to *desire* that downfall just to confirm a negative opinion about Cristiano Ronaldo.

At the end of that first game, how many voices were heard almost boasting about the sad fate of the national team they themselves had already proclaimed? I don't know if they were truly happy with the failure, or if it was just the ego of being "right" after having prophesied disaster, especially because Cristiano Ronaldo was on the field.

And this, more than pessimism, begins to border on disrespect. Not for criticizing a player—that's part of football—but for forgetting, with an almost ungrateful ease, everything that player has given to the National Team, to the country as a sporting nation, and to world football itself.

I'll go even further: many comments clearly cease to belong to the realm of sports analysis the moment they resort to disrespectful, almost humiliating adjectives to characterize an athlete. Criticizing technical choices, performance, positioning, or decisions on the field is legitimate; transforming that criticism into public scorn is something else entirely.

And this shouldn't depend on whether the player is named Cristiano Ronaldo. It should apply to any athlete, because there's a line that separates demanding standards from humiliation, analysis from mockery, and opinion from disrespect.