đš Wayne Rooney on people calling Cristiano Ronaldoâs 2008 season overrated:
âIâve seen people questioning Cristianoâs 2008 season again, and I genuinely wonder how many of them watched us play that year.
I was there. I played alongside him. I saw what defenders were doing to try to stop him, and I saw what happened when they couldnât.
I remember one game where Cristiano had two players following him almost everywhere. At one point, I said to him, âYouâve got two of them worried about you now.â
He looked at me and said, âGood. That means somebody else is free.â
And that was the thing people sometimes forget about him. Everyone remembers the goals, the tricks and the celebrations. But when teams started organising their entire defence around stopping one player, the rest of us benefited.
There were matches when youâd look up and see Cristiano making another run, even though heâd already made five or six without receiving the ball.
Iâd tell him, âYou know you donât have to chase every goal?â
Heâd say, âWayne, if I stop running, how am I going to score?â
You couldnât argue with him.
But Moscow is what I remember most.
Heâd scored our goal against Chelsea. People forget that sometimes because of what happened in the shootout.
When he missed his penalty, I knew exactly what heâd be thinking. Heâd scored 42 goals that season, helped us win the Premier League, and suddenly he was standing there believing he might have cost us the biggest trophy of the year.
When Edwin saved Anelkaâs penalty, everybody went crazy. We were European champions.
But Cristiano was crying.
I remember looking at him and thinking how strange football can be. A player can have the season of his life, score in the Champions League final, and still spend those last few minutes believing heâs let everyone down.
Thatâs how much it meant to him.
And thatâs why I find some of the criticism ridiculous.
People sit there nearly 20 years later, looking at clips and statistics, trying to explain why it wasnât that special.
We were playing against some of the best defenders in Europe. They knew what he wanted to do. Theyâd spend the entire week preparing for him.
Then Saturday would come, and heâd do it anyway.
Iâm not saying we didnât have a brilliant team. Of course we did. We had players who could win games all over the pitch.
But even in that dressing room, we knew Cristiano was doing something extraordinary.
The funniest thing is that people now use the fact that he played in such a good team against him.
Well, I was one of the players in that team. And I can tell you that having Cristiano alongside us made our jobs easier, not his.
If you want to argue about which individual season was the greatest, thatâs fine. Football is full of opinions.
But donât tell people who were there that what we watched every week wasnât special.
I saw Cristiano win his first Ballon dâOr. Iâve also seen him win four more.
And I still think thereâs something about that first one that people will never fully understand unless they remember the player he was before he became the Cristiano Ronaldo everybody knows today.â
Junto a la salida de Diego, su salida impacta directamente en cĂłmo NO pudimos volver a intentar juntar pases. La salida habitualmente era por costado izquierdo. Desde calidad de recepciĂłn de ambos, daban cierto sentido a eso. Sin esos receptores, envĂo largo.