5. 88th minute assist to Chicharito vs Atletico Madrid, UCL QF 2014/15
You can watch the assist here.
Matches against Diego Simeone’s Atletico Madrid are always heated and difficult. Atletico is very strong physically and defensively, which makes it difficult for any team to score against them. The same happened for Real Madrid in the Quarter-finals of 2014/15’s Champions League, as Los Blancos found it difficult to score against them at the Vicente Calderon and even the Bernabeu. Ronaldo and Chicharito got limited chances, but none of them could break the deadlock.
But in the 88th minute, Cristiano said enough and ended a game that could’ve probably gone into extra time. He drifted to the wide right, picked up the ball there, and made a blistering run towards the box. He played a one-two with James Rodriguez, before getting into a dangerous position in the box. Atletico’s defenders and keeper ran towards the man who had tortured them a lot of times by then. Ronaldo had a chance to shoot early, but he was losing balance and passed it to the open Javier Hernandez to guarantee the goal, and the Mexican duly converted the chance into a goal.
It might look like a simple move, but the context of the game explains everything. Without some of the team’s most important players, Ronaldo won the game for his team with an exemplary team move, and the roar of the Bernabeu combined with the team’s celebration shows us how important the moment is.
6. The day he toyed with Joel Matip using relentless stepovers followed by a goal vs Schalke, UCL RO16, 2013/14
You can get a great view of the goal here.
I see a lot of fans say on social media these days that Ronaldo attempts a lot of ‘useless’ stepovers. Maybe those people started watching football after Ronaldo’s knee injury, but CR7’s stepovers were never useless. The quick stepovers from Ronaldo in his prime always confused the defenders, and sometimes those moves even lead to goals.
One such incident occurred in 2014, as Ronaldo toyed with Joel Matip of Schalke with relentless stepover. He confused Matip with his quick and flashy stepovers, before drawing him into a wrong-footed position and eventually burying the ball into the net with his left foot. This isn’t an isolated goal and there are many more such goals that followed stepovers from Cristiano, and the same stepovers helped him beat hundreds of defenders.
Effective stepovers aren’t a skill that can be learned overnight. It took a lot of hard work from Ronaldo to become a master of this art. This goal just reminds us of how much he had to work, to reach this position.