There is a fascination always as legends fade, to watch how they rage against the diminution of their own powers, to see embodied in one shrugging, pouting frame the eternal human battle with mortality. Decay and decrepitude have their allure; what the romantics saw in a ruined abbey, so others will see in the dwindling figure of Cristiano Ronaldo.
Some day there will be a Portugal match that is not about Ronaldo – but not here, not yet. It wasn’t just about the penalty he had saved by Jan Oblak in extra time, which left him in tears. He did, at least, make up for it in the shootout. Everything is about Ronaldo; Portuguese football has become the great psychodrama of his ageing. Diogo Costa may have saved three penalties in the shootout, but even then this was about Ronaldo.
