CARDIFF // Cristiano Ronaldo urged us to look at the numbers. "The numbers don't lie," he replied to a question about whether, at 32, he might be approaching the downhill piste of his career. With Ronaldo, the numbers always keep climbing.
He struck the 599th and 600th goals of his senior professional career, clubs and country combined, during Saturday night’s 4-1 win for Real Madrid over Juventus in the Uefa Champions League final. Ronaldo scored in his fourth Champions League final – including last year’s converted penalty in a shoot-out – and collected his fourth European Cup trophy.
His Madrid set a landmark, too, as the first club to retain European club football’s most prestigious prize in the era it has been called the Champions League. Nobody had held and kept the so-called “Big Cup” for more than 12 months since AC Milan defended it in 1990.
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For much of the second half in Cardiff, Madrid electrified a vast global audience, producing what Ronaldo called perhaps “the best half of football we have played in an amazing season”.
More numbers – not just CR7’s – resonate within the most decorated football institution in Spain. “We have done a double,” Ronaldo reminded. Not since 1959, rather remarkably, have a Real Madrid with over 30 Spanish Liga crowns and now 12 European Cups combined both trophies in the same year.
When a club from a highly competitive domestic league pulls off a double, you look at the sources of their stamina as well as their spirit and what manager Zinedine Zidane called “the spectacular”.
Madrid, more impressive than they had been in beating Atletico Madrid in the 2014 and 2016 finals, were playing their 60th match of the season in Cardiff. Their league chase, a sapping joust with Barcelona, went to the final game of the Primera Liga. They faced tough battles in three out of four of their matches – against Bayern Munich and Atletico – in the quarter- and semi-finals of the Champions League.
Yet in Cardiff, the energy and verve of Zidane’s Madrid grew as Juventus, who might have stolen back the momentum with Mario Mandzukic’s athletic, brilliant equaliser, faded.
“Madrid pressed down on the accelerator,” said Max Allegri, Juventus’s manager. Zidane’s players, who have been carefully rotated and strategically rested at points during their marathon campaign, had plenty in the tank. Encouragingly for Zidane the legacy-builder, two of the younger members of the squad, Casemiro, and the substitute Marco Asensio, scored the goals Ronaldo did not.
“This is the best Madrid squad I have seen,” said a watching Raul, part of the Madrid sides who won the club’s seventh, eighth and ninth European Cups between 1998 and 2002 and a long-serving former captain who has seen several of his club goalscoring records overtaken by Ronaldo. Raul had teammates such as Zidane, Luis Figo, Brazil’s Ronaldo as well as Portugal’s Ronaldo, during his career but often played in XIs without the balance, or the back-up, that Zidane’s Madrid have cultivated.
In a fine, tricky act of management, Zidane last August persuaded Ronaldo that some pause in his insatiable appetite for ever higher numbers – more goals, more games – might benefit the player and the club. So Ronaldo has played fewer minutes in recent months than he is used to doing. “I was very well prepared for this final,” said the Portuguese after collecting the man-of-the-match award in Cardiff from Alex Ferguson, once his manager and mentor at Manchester United. “I feel like a young boy.”
Asensio, 21 is barely more than a young boy, and, slick and elegant, already the face of Madrid’s optimism for the long-term. Casemiro, 25, has the look of a leader-in-waiting and, if he can avoid the kind of snide edge that captain Sergio Ramos again showed in the theatrics that helped get Juan Cuadrado, the Juventus substitute, sent off late in the final, he may turn out a more admired one than Ramos is.
“It has been an amazing season,” Ronaldo said. “But I keep saying that every season.”
He may say it again, too. Madrid should start 2017/18 as favourites to retain their Liga title in a Spain where Atletico are hamstrung by a Fifa transfer ban, and Barcelona are bedding in a new manager, Ernesto Valverde, amid a renewed bout of soul-searching about style, identity and the fact that Real Madrid are striding ahead of them.
In Europe, the champions of Italy have just been thoroughly beaten. The champions of Germany were dispatched in the quarter-finals. Madrid will monitor the substantial investments their rival clubs make in new players this summer, but they will not fret over that. Zidane, and Ronaldo, will, rather, feel excited by the idea of not two, but three back-to-back Champions League titles.
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