There is another clásico this weekend, another head-to-head between Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. But it is now possible to wonder how many more of these we’re going to getTowards the end of his life Mozart wrote a piece of music called Ein musikalischer Spaß, or “a musical joke”, intended as a satire on bad composers. As you might expect it contained a hilarious discord in the horns section, some off-key sonata and – LOL – a polytonal finale.No doubt back in the 1780s this was all very weeping-laughing-emoji-face. Listening to it now, A Musical Joke just sounds predictably ace, brill, fun, yeah, really good. It turns up on the kind of CDs you buy at petrol stations called The...
Cristiano Ronaldo has scored more goals than any other Real Madrid player and yet he was whistled by supporters against Bayern Munich. How is that possible?There are supposed to be about 1,300 words in this article. It is tempting to just spend 1,287 of them listing the things that Cristiano Ronaldo has done at Real Madrid – and there are more than enough of them to take up all that space, that is for sure, from the two Champions League titles to the 395 goals – and then leave just enough room at the bottom to add: “On Tuesday night at the Santiago Bernabéu some Real Madrid fans whistled him. Dicks.” On one level at least that would probably sum...
The Real Madrid forward scored a hat-trick in the last derby against Atlético at the Vicente Calderón, with the numbers starting to add up for his managerCristiano Ronaldo put his hands on his hips and took a long, lingering look up at the Vicente Calderón. He stood there for a while, alone, striking a challenging pose, chest out and steady in front of the south stand. Beyond the netting, a barrier for flying objects, thousands of Atlético Madrid fans raised their middle fingers and their voices. Others just looked stunned. In the middle somewhere, one of them puffed on a cigarette. So this is how it ends. An hour and a half earlier, a huge banner had engulfed them all:...
Even without physical comparisons with his former team-mate Cristiano Ronaldo, Rooney is unable to keep up with today’s hard-running demandsIn between buffing and burnishing his alarmingly sculpted physique, Cristiano Ronaldo likes to take 3am ice baths to boost his metabolism. He eats six high-protein meals a day, rarely drinks alcohol and refuses soft drinks. Away from the constant task of tweaking his already unimprovable musculature, Ronaldo relaxes by swimming, sleeping a strict eight hours and – oh yes – doing 3,000 sit ups a day in front of the television.It is of course pointless to compare mere mortals with such extreme athletic obsession. But this does still seem to be the lot of Wayne Rooney, in part because of the...