YOKOHAMA, 5 July — At the moment of flooding triumph it wasn’t just the weeping Ronaldo’s World Cup — it was his life and his destiny compressed into one warm, fantastic night in Japan.
Pele, the greatest footballer who ever lived, said that the 25-year-old from Rio, son of an addict but heir to the richest tradition in all of football, was extraordinary, but his final anointment would have to await his first world championship.
The waiting is over. Ronaldo may not be Pele, he might not even have matched the compelling, brilliant rage to win of Diego Maradona in Mexico 16 years ago when he secured a World Cup triumph almost single-handedly for Argentina, but the story of what he achieved here over the last four weeks will surely always be told as long as football is the game of the world.
If it was just a matter of detail, the recounting of Ronaldo’s World Cup would be stunning enough. Despite a constant fight against the effects of injury, he scored eight goals in seven games, two of them crushing the amazingly durable Germans in the 67 and 79th minutes of the final of the 17th great tournament. In so doing he delivered Brazil their fifth golden trophy — two more than the Germans who, as three-time winners, sought to draw level and were ultimately damned for their impertinence. But Ronaldo’s triumph was more than the seizing of a moment. It was the rebuilding of a life, one which four years ago in Paris — at this same peak of sporting endeavor — seemed to have been submerged in doubts that would perhaps never be dispelled. He had a fit at the dawn of the final with France in the Stade de France. He played, but only as a parody of the 21-year-old who had come to the World Cup as the greatest prodigy the game had seen since Pele, a winner, already, of two FIFA awards as World Player of the Year. His morale was reduced still further by career-threatening knee injuries and at one point the worry was that his club Internazionale might run out of patience along with Brazil.
Sunday night the fears and the waiting turned to gold. Ronaldo broke the spirit of Germany’s superb goalkeeper and captain Oliver Kahn when he made his first strike.
Rivaldo, for so long a fierce rival as much as a teammate of Ronaldo’s, shot straight at Kahn. However, for once the defiant leader of a team many said had no right to be in this final failed in the kind of chore which over the years he has suggested he might accomplish in his sleep. Kahn, who had earlier twice thwarted Ronaldo at close range, fumbled the ball and it rolled free. When the goalkeeper saw into whose path he had directed it, his blood ran cold. Ronaldo swooped, and the match, you knew in your bones, was over.
Later, when Kahn lay resting against a goalpost, watching the Brazil carnival unfolding across the vast reach of Yokohama’s International Stadium, you felt he was living the first reflective minutes of regrets which would last a lifetime.
He had had a magnificent tournament, conceding just one goal before Sunday’s night’s game — and that in injury time — but like the rest of the football word who had come here with such hard ambition, he found that he too was required to submit to the will of Ronaldo.
The second goal was authentically Brazilian. Gilberto Silva, an unheralded midfielder beforehand but a growing force in the final stages, crossed from the right, Rivaldo jumped over the ball, and it fell, heart-stoppingly, to Ronaldo. He moved to his right and measured the distance between Kahn and his left-handed post. He saw that it was negotiable. He struck it crisply and low and this time there was no cause for Kahn’s reproach.
Ronaldo had the Golden Boot for the tournament’s top scorer, he finished three ahead of Germany’s Miroslav Klose and Rivaldo, and Brazil had an extraordinary victory which, in the end, was less about the sublime talent still represented by such as Rivaldo and the new star on the horizon, Ronaldinho — and, of course, the man who now again bestrides the football world — but a collective spirit and will to re-create the past which centered, with ever-increasing force, around the man who four years earlier had seemed to be randomly destroyed.
Luiz Felipe Scolari, the coach who had taken such fierce criticism because of his refusal to accept the claims of the of aging but still hugely popular striker Romario, said it with tears in his eyes.
He declared: “We had a lot of difficulties coming into this tournament but we have won it because of an amazing mentality. It is one the players, with Ronaldo so prominent, displayed so strongly throughout this World Cup. It is the mentality which just does not accept being second. It says that second is for losers. When you are second you are just the first of the losers. The players couldn’t live with that and so they played to their limits. They gave the people of Brazil everything they had.” But for the moment at least Ronaldo is the great winner, the redeemer of the world’s greatest football nation — and of himself.
Before the tournament he vowed to the people of Brazil that he would deliver a fifth World Cup and wipe away the horror of what happened at the Stade de France. He said, “There can be no doubt we will win the Cup. I believe that the whole team are feeling a great strength, which is being passed around, and after all the bad times I have a feeling that I can find strength I have never had before.” And so it was as Brazil erupted so far beyond what had seemed to be the slender sum of their parts coming into the tournament. Ronaldo was huge, talismanic, but there were other stirring developments. Rivaldo, so often a quirkish, smoldering colleague, resentful of the early adulation that flowed to the young Ronaldo, finally surrendered the most negative effects of his hard-driven ego. There was a wonderful symbolism about the fact that it was he who leaped over the ball before Ronaldo made the decisive strike, and when the ball sped beyond the now plagued Kahn, his joy was so unforced he might have been dancing on a carnival float.
Ronaldo’s deification in his native Rio and even in Pele’s fortress of Sao Paolo will scarcely brush against any bounds now. But the joy for Brazil plainly rests on more than the redemption of their most celebrated modern son. There were signs, too, of an emerging Brazilian team, and nowhere was this more evident than in another performance by Ronaldinho that was touched by an exquisite skill.
Twice in the first half he delivered beautifully-weighted, killer balls to the feet of Ronaldo. In many ways this liberation of the trapped spirit of Brazilian football was as much to do with Ronaldinho as the man he served so diligently. Ronaldinho is of the poorest of his land. He saw his father die tragically in a swimming pool bought by the football earnings of his elder brother. It was poignancy perhaps peculiar to the life of Brazil which can move so swiftly between heaven and hell. Certainly it was a scene guaranteed to traumatize a young boy, but there was no sign of a shadow over Ronaldinho when he ran with his arms upheld after the beating of a brave and resilient German team.
Nine months Germany were ripped apart by Michael Owen and his England teammates, but here they have given their conquerors that night in Munich an object lesson in spirit and football nous. But of course it was not enough to quell the native brilliance of Brazil. That was enshrined last night in the moving story of Ronaldo’s re-birth — and coronation But of course there was a little more to the story. At its heart it concerned the revitalized life of the greatest football nation we will surely ever know.
Ronaldo returns as
football’s favorite son
When Ronaldo’s knee collapsed two years ago the injury was more than a blow for his club Inter Milan and his country Brazil — the whole world felt his pain.
Twice voted World Player of the Year, the hugely popular striker had become a symbol of the game, in the manner of greats such as Diego Maradona, Johan Cruyff and his compatriot Pele. Yet at the age of 23 his career was threatened and he faced the prospect of being remembered as one of the finest talents never to fully realise his unquestionable ability. Now his two goals in Brazil’s World Cup triumph over Germany on Sunday have finally restored him to his status as the world’s favourite footballer.
He had been the best forward of the World Cup throughout and his performance in the final surely made him the player of the tournament. As the reaction to his night of glory testifies, Ronaldo’s popularity has always been based on more than goals alone.
An honest, straightforward football-mad lad, who is also a young father, husband and a genuine advocate for children’s charities, Ronaldo’s reputation has never been sullied by play-acting, violence or scandal.
The huge smile on his face as he celebrated his country’s unprecedented fifth World Cup win appears to have closed three seasons of agony, frustration and nagging doubts.
Sunday night in the International Stadium in Yokohama seemed to belong to a different era from the time when he struggled into Inter’s training ground on crutches and winced as he had to deal with questions about his future. Since then he has had to deal with accusations that he had become overweight, panics surrounding every minor muscle strain and the general, if largely unspoken, belief that he would never again be the player he once was.
Ronaldo’s injury misery began in late 1999 when he had an operation on his right knee. His comeback match for Inter six months later, as a substitute in the Italian Cup final against Lazio, lasted only six minutes when he tore ligaments in the same knee. This time, a painstaking recovery took almost two years but his comeback was then cut short by a series of frustrating muscular injuries.
At the start of this year, he was taken back to Brazil from Italy where an eight-strong team of professionals — including two doctors, a nutritionist and a physiotherapist — spent one month effectively rebuilding the stricken star.
This time, it worked. The muscular injuries went away and Ronaldo’s goals helped Inter remain in the Italian title race until the final day of the season. But his dream of finally ending Inter’s wait for their first Serie A title since 1989 ended at the venue where he had suffered that serious ligament injury — Rome’s Olympic stadium. (The Independent)
