A major recurring theme at the past few major tournaments has been about whether Ronaldo should start.<\/p>\n
He has scored 146 goals for his country, a record in men’s international football – but recently cynics have suggested he does not offer much else.<\/p>\n
And with fame and status that transcends the game, Martinez seemingly dared not drop him.<\/p>\n
But a team filled with some of the best defenders and midfielders in the world may have hoped to do better than make the last 16.<\/p>\n
Four of the squad helped Paris St-Germain win the past two Champions League titles – left-back Nuno Mendes, midfielders Vitinha and Joao Neves and striker Goncalo Ramos, who joined AC Milan this summer.<\/p>\n
Manchester United’s Bruno Fernandes was the Premier League’s player of the year.<\/p>\n
“How did Goncalo Ramos not get on the pitch?” asked Sutton.<\/p>\n
“It’s an absolute embarrassment from the manager, just pandering to his star player. <\/p>\n
“He’s the most decorated player that Portugal have ever had but you’ve got to be stronger than that.”<\/p>\n
Ronaldo finished the tournament with three goals, a double against Uzbekistan and a penalty against Croatia.<\/p>\n
But despite 10 players scoring more goals, only four players at the 2026 World Cup had more shots than Ronaldo’s 18.<\/p>\n
Ronaldo had the same amount of efforts as seven-goal joint top scorer Erling Haaland has currently had.<\/p>\n
He only created one chance for a team-mate in his five games by comparison.<\/p>\n
Some 366 players touched the ball more times than Ronaldo at the World Cup despite him playing all bar nine minutes of Portugal’s five games.<\/p>\n
Martinez said: “When you need a goal you cannot take Cristiano off, at least in 90 minutes, he is physically capable – his presence, open space, dead-ball situations, we need his experience.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A major recurring theme at the past few major tournaments has been about whether Ronaldo should start. He…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":747963,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[403,99],"class_list":["post-747962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=747962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747962\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/747963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=747962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=747962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=747962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}