Cristiano Ronaldo has been grandly ever-present before Saturday’s Champions League final, lurking behind every object in your eyeline like the sky, or God. Away from football the Ronaldo newswire has been ticking and whirring away through the night. Ronaldo reveals his summer style secrets. Ronaldo’s girlfriend may or may not be pregnant. Ronaldo has been declared the most famous athlete on Earth – by an algorithm.
As Real Madrid and Juventus complete their preparations for an intriguing final in Cardiff a large part of the analysis has, as ever, been bound up in trying to explain Ronaldo. Rarely can such miniature, deceptively simple athletic craft have been so carefully picked over. Not least in the last two years as Ronaldo’s movements have been scaled back into the supreme repetitions of his role as a pure goalscorer. And so the search goes on for the definitive take on that stylised robo-deity brilliance, the same movements, the same routine exceptionalism, a kind of chem-sex football, all manly, muscular, sculpted hunger.
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