“He was always focused on the tiny
details. I was in restaurants with him on
team trips and sometimes plates of ham
were served. All the players would eat, but
he would only take one slice. The man is a
winner – if you made a mistake in training,
he’d say so. When you saw his work ethic,
you knew he was doing it for himself, not for
the sake of showing others.”
There was still time for some rest, though.
“He was quite a social person,” continues
Drenthe. “One time we were sitting at the
back of the team bus, when Ronaldo fell in
love with [model] Irina Shayk. Cristiano was
the one who was able to hook up with girls
like her, Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton, so
already for us it was interesting to hear what
he had to say! That day he was like, ‘I’m so
in love with her, what should I do?’ One of us
suggested, ‘Cris, just send her 1,000 roses’.
I swear he looked up, looked at us, then said,
‘Yes, that’s what I’m going to do.’ Afterwards,
he called one of his people and said, ‘Listen,
send 1,000 roses to Irina Shayk’.” The pair
dated for more than five years.
Ronaldo scored 26 league goals in his first
season at Madrid, outshining fellow summer
signing Kaká and helping the team amass
a club-record 96 points. It still wasn’t enough:
Messi scored 34 and Guardiola’s Barça won
La Liga with 99 points. Perhaps taking advice
he’d received from Usain Bolt a bit too literally
(“I told him to be rougher and opponents
will leave him alone”), Ronaldo was sent off
twice that campaign, the second for breaking
a defender’s nose.
In his second season, he began to feel
more comfortable when Karim Benzema
featured more regularly, in place of the more
predatory Gonzalo Higuaín. He netted 40 La
Liga goals to pip Messi to the Pichichi prize,
plundering 53 in all competitions.
“These stories people tell about Ronaldo
and Messi battling each other, I lived them
for three years,” says Jose Morais, part of the
club’s coaching staff under Jose Mourinho,
who replaced Manuel Pellegrini that season.
“I never heard him say, ‘Man, I have to beat
Messi,’ but he always wanted to be the best
of the best. In Spain, who could give him
a fight? Messi. They were in the same league,
so it was easy to compare their numbers.
“It was a dynamic that Real took
advantage of, because Cristiano is a born
competitor. I’ve seen people say he’s a bad
loser, but he’s fighting an inner fight; he’s
fighting himself. If he scored 30 times in a
season, he’d try to score 40 times in the next
one – and it’s not like he sits and waits for
that to happen. He works his ass off.
“If you pay attention to his in-game body
language, you can see he demands a lot of
himself. There are people that have negative
dialogues inside their heads – not Cristiano.
His inner voice is aggressive but in a positive
way, saying, ‘F**k it, man, you are so much
better than this – don’t give up, try again’.”
When things still don’t go well, frustration
is the inevitable by-product. Mourinho’s first
Clásico ended in a 5-0 defeat to a mesmeric
Barça at the Camp Nou – Ronaldo shoved
Guardiola on the touchline, sparking a massscuffle. Barcelona would march to another
league crown, but Ronaldo got his moment
when he faced them again in the Copa del
Rey final, jumping high to head home an
extra-time winner.
“The goal in the final of the Copa del Rey
was celebrated so much, because it broke
the hegemony of Guardiola’s Barça,” former
Real Madrid striker Fernando Morientes tells
FFT. “Cristiano represented the leap in quality
needed to rise to the occasion.”
Literally, in the case of that cup final. “The
moment he jumped to head that ball, the
game was over,” remembers Morais. “Only
an extraordinary player such as Cristiano can
score a goal like he did that night. We were
able to take that first step in the direction of
ending the Barça era.”
In 2011–12, Ronaldo halted the
Blaugrana’s three-year winning streak in La
Liga. Barça scored 114 goals, but Madrid
replied with a record 121. Ronaldo smashed
46 of them, including a magnificent seven
hat-tricks, as Los Blancos became the first
side in La Liga history to accumulate 100
points in a single season.
It had taken a crazy level of performance
to topple Guardiola’s side, but Ronaldo had
continued driving himself and Real on until
they achieved it.
“He was a player with so much
personality and he’d carry the responsibility
of the entire team,” says Morientes. “You
expected good numbers from him, but not
that he’d score more goals than the amount
of games he’d played. Madrid went onto the
pitch knowing they were winning 1-0.”
Ronaldo had struck a winner at the Camp
Nou in late April to effectively seal the title.
Defeated and stressed, Guardiola announced
a week later that he was leaving Barça at the
end of the season.THE ABORTED COMEBACK
That campaign was also the first meeting of
Ronaldo and Raphaël Varane, signed as an
18 year old from Lens. Varane soon earned
CR7’s respect by having the self-confidence
to stand up for himself.“CRISTIAnO’S InnER VOICE IS
AGGRESSIVE: ‘F**K IT, YOU’RE
SO MUCH BETTER THAn THIS’”
Clockwise from top
Ronnie loved playing
alongside Benzema;
“They’ve run out of
roses... sorry, dear”;
European glory with
Madrid; wait, wasn’t
Becks Golden Balls?;
“Cris, do you want
to be best mates?”THE
STORY OF
MAn UTD126 The Story of Man Utd FourFourTwo.com