Relief for Belgium Comes at Ronaldo’s Expense
The list of people who had let Cristiano Ronaldo down was, by the end, a long and illustrious one.
Their transgressions had varied, in both nature and severity, and so had their punishments: Diogo Jota, failure to pass, hard stare; Renato Sanches, not getting out of the way of a free kick, baleful finger-point; Bruno Fernandes, speculative and wildly inaccurate shooting not entirely unfamiliar to Ronaldo himself, primal scream into Seville’s stifling night sky.
Ronaldo, in his defense, had much to complain about. Portugal was in the process of surrendering the European crown it had scrapped and scrambled to win in France five years ago with hardly a whimper, meekly exiting the competition in the first knockout round with a 1-0 defeat to a surprisingly fragile Belgium team, and none of his teammates were beyond reproach.
Jota had been wasteful. Bernardo Silva had been ineffectual to the point of anonymity. Fernandes had injected a little vim and vigor after his introduction as a second-half substitute, but his energy was faintly chaotic, his blue-sky ideas seemingly generated at random, rooted more in hope than expectation. João Félix, thrown on at the same time as Fernandes, had struggled to match the rhythm of the game.
