One More Dance: Have Ronaldo and Messi Still Got the Legs?
Portugal drew Spain, Argentina drew Egypt, and both ties carry the same subplot. Two legends, twenty years of magic, and one question the knockouts always ask in the end. Can they still last?
Two ties in this Round of 16 carry the same quiet subplot, and it has nothing to do with tactics or team news. It is about time.
Portugal face Spain. Argentina face Egypt. And in each camp sits a man who has spent the best part of twenty years wooing crowds, tormenting defences and rewriting the record books. Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi are still the reason millions tune in. The question, as the tournament sharpens and the games get heavier, is whether either can still be the reason their team wins.
Portugal turned it around after Ronaldo left the pitch
The Croatia game should have been a coronation. Instead it became a warning.
Luka Modric's side, veterans themselves and refusing to read the script, went ahead just after the hour through a well-worked move that left Portugal chasing shadows. Ronaldo, who had laboured for much of the evening, was withdrawn around the same time. What happened next is the part worth sitting with. Portugal did not wilt without him. They improved.
The fresh legs of Rafael Leao, Pedro Neto and the substitutes changed the tempo. The equaliser came in the 68th minute, the winner in the 90th, and Portugal walked off 2-1 winners having done their best work with their talisman watching from the bench. It was a night that flattered the scoreline and exposed the tension at the heart of this Portugal side. The team is built around Ronaldo, but it may now be quicker without him.
That is an uncomfortable thing to write about a man with his record, and it will be a more uncomfortable thing to test against Spain.
Spain are the wrong opponent at the wrong time
Of all the sides Portugal could have drawn, Spain are close to the worst-case scenario. They dismantled Austria 3-0 with the kind of controlled, suffocating football that leaves opponents chasing the ball for ninety minutes. This is a young, relentless Spain, and the projections make them clear favourites to go through.
Against that, a Portugal side that wants to slow the game down and feed its 41-year-old focal point has a problem. You cannot press Spain in short bursts and rest in between. You have to run. And running for the full ninety, possibly longer, is precisely the thing Ronaldo can no longer guarantee.
Messi did the opposite, and it may have cost him
Where Ronaldo was spared, Messi endured everything.
Argentina's 3-2 win over Cape Verde was one of the games of the tournament, and Messi was on the pitch for all 120 minutes of it. Argentina led early, were pegged back after the hour, and could not shake off a Cape Verde side who kept coming. It went to extra time. Argentina edged ahead in the 92nd, Cape Verde levelled again in the 103rd, and only a winner in the 111th settled it. Cape Verde fly home beaten but adored, a genuine story of the summer.
Messi got Argentina over the line, as he so often does. But two hours of football at 38, followed by a short turnaround, is a heavy toll. The reigning champions looked less like a machine and more like a team leaning very hard on one man to conjure something when the plan runs out.
Egypt will not be the pushover the odds suggest
Argentina are heavy favourites against Egypt, and on paper it is a mismatch. Look closer and it is trickier than that. Egypt came through their own marathon, holding Australia to 1-1 and outlasting them in a shootout after extra time, with Mohamed Salah dragging them forward. This is a side that defends deep, stays patient and carries a match-winner of its own.
Argentina will expect to win. They will probably win. But if Egypt sit in and make it a long, attritional afternoon, the burden falls again on legs that have already done a full extra half-hour this tournament.
From engine to totem
Here is the honest reading of both ties. Ronaldo and Messi are no longer the engines of their teams. They are the totems. The difference matters.
An engine drives the whole ninety minutes. A totem provides the moment, the free kick, the half-yard of space, the finish nobody else sees, and then needs the team around him to do the rest. Portugal proved against Croatia that they have the runners to cover. Argentina will hope theirs can do the same, because Messi cannot press, chase and create for two hours a game and still be there in a final.
Neither of these tournaments will be won on stamina alone. They rarely are. What both of these players still offer is the one thing you cannot coach and cannot buy, the ability to decide a knockout tie in a single second. Whether that is enough, against a Spain in full flow or an Egypt determined to make it ugly, is the question the next few days will answer.
The gods of the game are still here. They just cannot run like they used to. And somewhere in that gap between what they were and what they are is the most compelling story left in this World Cup.
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