Skip to main content

Advertisement

Advertisement

Ronaldo lives to play, and lives for Portugal

You see a different kind of Cristiano Ronaldo when you are the manager of his team. The rest of the world has become obsessed with the image and the look of the man, or how he celebrates when he scores, or how he reacts when things go wrong.

Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal. Photo: Getty Images

Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal. Photo: Getty Images

You see a different kind of Cristiano Ronaldo when you are the manager of his team. The rest of the world has become obsessed with the image and the look of the man, or how he celebrates when he scores, or how he reacts when things go wrong.

I just saw a guy who always wanted to do his best.

First of all, I never once saw him in front of the dressing-room mirror or worrying about how he looked. For Cristiano, the priority was always to win.

There were a lot of strong guys in that Real Madrid dressing room — it was a basic requirement of being at the club that you needed a big personality.

Of all of them, Ronaldo and Sergio Ramos were the leaders of the team, and that meant that at times, they would speak to their team-mates before games.

Ronaldo cared about the team. He liked to be with his team-mates after the game had finished and talk through what had happened — what had gone well, what had been not so good.

He also liked to joke, too. We had a lot of fun over those two years. Even when you play for Real Madrid, and even when the world expects you to score every game, that does not mean that you cannot have a joke sometimes.

Occasionally when he came back from international duty I would say to him, if he had not scored for Portugal, “Hey, Cristiano, what’s going on? You went all that way and you didn’t score?”

He would say to me, “Boss, don’t worry, I’m going to score next game.”

Most of the time he did. He scored 112 goals for my Real Madrid teams over those two seasons. That is phenomenal. I would like to say I told him which side to beat the goalkeeper, but with a boy like that you just need to keep him ticking over.

He is a pleasure to manage.

ONLY FOOTBALL MATTERS

We all know about the work he puts in to be so strong and his perfectionism on the training ground when it comes to technique.

He also understands that a lot about being a top footballer, with the demands of the modern game, is about recovery. It is what you do in between the games that counts for so much. He would talk to our medical staff all the time, he would try to figure out what he needed.

In my first season, he went nine consecutive games in February and March, and scored in every one.

The second season, he scored in 13 straight games, from the end of August to the start of November.

That September, he scored seven in two games in the space of three days: Three against Deportivo la Coruna and then four against Elche.

The boy lived for the game — everything else was built to fit around it. That meant his recovery times, what he ate, when he ate, his commercial commitments, even his private life.

All of it was organised so that when he stepped on the pitch, he would be at the absolute peak of his performance.

No footballer can be 100 per cent fit every time he plays, but Ronaldo never got badly injured because he did so much of the prevention work that can help you avoid problems.

When things go wrong on the pitch, he does not hide it. That was the way when Portugal played Hungary last week, and it was the same when he played for Madrid.

He got sent off once in each of the two seasons when I was manager. The first time was against Athletic Bilbao when he got in a confrontation with Carlos Gurpegui and Ander Iturraspe. They were trying to provoke him, and most of the time, it does not work.

But it did that day, and afterwards, I said to him that while I could see why it happened, a red card did not help him or the team. We held on for a draw but I could see that he knew the team needed him. Heunderstood that.

Do not get me wrong, the treatment of him by defenders is nothing like the kind of violence that was dished out to, say, Diego Maradona in the 1980s. Football has changed since then, thank God. But it nags away at a player, and Cristiano always has to be on his guard that he does not react

His natural personality is that he is not someone who is interested in fighting. Rather, he is someone who just wants to play.

Give him the ball and let him take the other side on. He knows that no one can live with him when he is at his best, and there were days when I wondered if he even noticed who was supposed to be marking him.

PLAYING FOR PORTUGAL IS FUNDAMENTAL

He cares a lot about Portugal. You can see that he never swerves a game.

His best friends in the dressing room when I was there were the other Portuguese, Pepe and Fabio Coentrao. If he was Spanish, he would have won two European Championships and a World Cup by now, perhaps even more.

Playing for Portugal is fundamental to him. He would like to win something on the international stage but very few do, and if it does not work out — well, that happens.

The point is that he showed his country that he cares about Portugal, that it matters to him as much as anything else.

Sometimes, as a great player, you have to be happy with that and that alone. It is not like you can change your country, even if you wanted to.

I always get asked about Lionel Messi and how Cristiano regards him. The truth is, we did not spend all our days at Madrid talking about Messi.

Cristiano respects Messi a lot. In a way, I think they need one another. Each one pushes the other to new heights, to new records of goalscoring. Ronaldo signed for Manchester United in 2003 and played his first international tournament in 2004. Twelve years on, he is still the biggest European star. That is incredible.

Were it not for the other, one of Cristiano or Messi would probably have won the Ballon d’Or eight times, rather than three for one and five for the other. Or perhaps they would not have flown so high without the other pushing them on.

As a manager, it was a pleasure to be in charge of Ronaldo. He wanted to play every week and he wanted to score every week.

I never went to bed the night before a match worrying about whether he was going to be ready.

About the author:

Carlo Ancelotti is one of the most successful managers in European club football and the only coach to have won three Champions League titles (two with AC Milan, and one with Real Madrid). He has also won league titles with Milan, Chelsea and Paris St Germain. He takes charge of Bayern Munich next season. He worked with Ronaldo when he managed Real from 2013-2015.

Read more of the latest in

Advertisement

Advertisement

Stay in the know. Anytime. Anywhere.

Subscribe to get daily news updates, insights and must reads delivered straight to your inbox.

By clicking subscribe, I agree for my personal data to be used to send me TODAY newsletters, promotional offers and for research and analysis.