It was an eventful end to an unexpected yet intriguing spat between Ronaldo and Hallgrimsson. <\/p>\n
Ronaldo previously had good memories of Dublin. Sixteen years ago, he played his first game for Real Madrid – a pre-season friendly against Shamrock Rovers – at Aviva Stadium.<\/p>\n
In his eve-of-match news conference, Ronaldo said it was “lovely” to be back. <\/p>\n
However, he also accused the Republic of Ireland boss of mind games after the Icelander urged the referee not to be influenced by the five-time Ballon d’Or winner. <\/p>\n
Hallgrimsson had said that, in Portugal’s win over the Republic of Ireland in October, Ronaldo – who had a penalty saved in that game – was “controlling the referee”.<\/p>\n
“He complimented me for putting pressure on the referee,” said Hallgrimsson when asked about their touchline exchange, which ended with a handshake.<\/p>\n
“It was his action on the pitch that cost him the red card. It had nothing to do with me – unless I got into his head.”<\/p>\n
Asked if he spoke to Ronaldo after the game, Hallgrimsson added: “No, I think we spoke enough when he came off.<\/p>\n
“There was nothing to speak about. This was just a moment of a little silliness from him, I would say.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was an eventful end to an unexpected yet intriguing spat between Ronaldo and Hallgrimsson. Ronaldo previously had…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":283038,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-283037","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283037\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/283038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}