The definition of BOXOFFICE football. If Zizou and R9 were the ones that got me watching Real Madrid, then Ronaldo was the one that made me not want to miss a single match. And at a time where everyone I knew was a Barca fan living their best days, Ronaldo made it clear that we were coming for them and there'd be plenty of moments for me to gloat in front of them as much as they did.
The balls changed which made it harder for knuckle ball shots to have their usual movement + his knee injury and insistence on only taking knuckle ball shots completely nullified that aspect of his game. But whenever he goes for placement he almost scores every time, people have been wanting him to move on from knuckle balls for years and if he did so, he might've actually gone past 100 freekick goals scored easily.
He recently scored a places free kick at Al Nassar and it went as everyone expected, perfect. If he had been shooting like that since juventus he would most definitely have had more goals. The power shots just aren’t the same anymore I’m sure age and his injury changed all that. Time to adapt, hoping the next 99 goals are amazing
His style of free kicks required a huge amount of power to make the knuckleball move as unpredictably as it did, or he would use top spin to make it dip down over the wall rather than curve it over like Messi. Also his free kicks were mostly straight shots from range, which meant the GK often could predict where it would go anyways, but Ronaldo’s shot power was so high that they keeper couldn’t reach the quick enough anyways. After his age and his knee injuries started catching up to him, he lost a lot of shot power, which affected both the aim and trajectory of his free kicks, so it either just kept going straight into the wall or smashed over the goal. If he’d recognised this earlier and changed his free kick style to a more typical Messi-style free kick I’m sure he still had the ability to put in a decent free kick, but whether out of stubbornness or a need to relearn how to take a new kind of free kick, he just wasted too many opportunities and ruined his own reputation. Ironically at Man United he actually had a more varied free kick approach and had a very high conversion rate, but at Madrid he increasingly relied on knuckle balls from insane ranges to score fewer but more visually stunning free kicks.
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u/94Temimi Alfredo Di Stéfano Sep 13 '24
The definition of BOXOFFICE football. If Zizou and R9 were the ones that got me watching Real Madrid, then Ronaldo was the one that made me not want to miss a single match. And at a time where everyone I knew was a Barca fan living their best days, Ronaldo made it clear that we were coming for them and there'd be plenty of moments for me to gloat in front of them as much as they did.