Soccer: Ronaldo's epic journey

By JAMES LAWTON

Even in the worst of years, which you now have to force yourself to remember this one threatened to be, you cannot separate Brazilian football from the epic.

Epic sadness, joy, pain; it all spills out of a game shaped in the shanties and so often moved to the heavens.

Ronaldo's story is an epic of redemption, and it is one unfolding at the World Cup finals so dramatically that even the most romantic and successful cup nation of them all might be obliged tomorrow night in Yokohama to ransack all their history and conclude they cannot find one to compare.

The goal that beat Turkey on Thursday was Ronaldo's sixth of a competition which many believed would simply pass by a Brazilian team so far from their old greatness that they lost an unprecedented six qualifying games.

The strike came in a sudden spurt of virtuosity and it means that this 17th World Cup, which seemed to have been ambushed by teams who came from nowhere, will be returned to one of its two greatest sources of power.

Inevitably, there is an eerie feeling that the script might already have been written elsewhere.

If it should happen that Ronaldo, the ghost of a potentially great footballer in Paris four years ago, makes a decisive score against Germany, if he puts down the team with the second-best record in the history of the great tournament, and if he maintains his one-goal lead over his brilliant team-mate Rivaldo to finish as the top scorer, it will certainly be arguable that no player has ever travelled back so far, against such heavy odds, to finish on top of his world.

Of course, certain goals are beyond the 25-year-old who had a brainstorm and a full body scan before going out as the merest shell of himself in Brazil's 3-0 loss against France in the 1998 final.

He cannot quite expect to walk in the company of the man who will probably always be regarded as the greatest footballer who ever lived. Whatever Ronaldo does in Yokohama, it is unlikely to project him to a place alongside Pele.

In 1966 , Pele was literally kicked out of the World Cup. He was helped off the field after being hacked to defeat by a brutal, shameful Portuguese performance.

Four years later, in Mexico City, he was the player of players, an astonishing compendium of skill, strength, dignity and humility in a Brazilian performance which sober judges insist can never be matched as long as the game is played.

But that is history, glorious Brazilian history, and Ronaldo is obliged to operate today under the shadow of persistent injury crisis.

Coming into this tournament, one of his Brazilian admirers summed up the nation's overwhelming view of the player who, before his crisis at the Stade de France, seemed to hold the whole world of football in the palm of his hand.

"We know," he said, "that we have a magnificent thoroughbred in Ronaldo - but is he made of glass?"

No, he is made of a more durable substance than that.

Still, he was required to leave the action early in the semifinal, as he did last week when his team-mates, deprived of the emerging, brilliant Ronaldinho, held off England with some ease.

But on Wednesday night, when he gave way to Luizao in the 68th minute, it was after he had produced the moment that defined the difference between a splendidly workmanlike and combative Turkey, and the heirs to Pele.

At times fragile, erratic heirs, no doubt; players who mix brilliance with vulnerability in a dizzying flow.

But players who, in Ronaldo and his often-mesmerising team-mate Rivaldo, have points of artistry and bite which always promise to carry them so far beyond any rivals.

Rivaldo might have scored three goals in a free-wheeling, spinning, extrovert assault on the Turkish defence in which the goalkeeper, Rustu Recber, performed with superb defiance until the moment his left hand came down too slowly to stop the deceptively delivered Ronaldo shot.

The move that made the difference flowed in the classic Brazilian way.

Gilberto Silva collected the ball from Marcos and sped down the left flank, leaving Fatih Akyel in his wake, and when he turned it inside to Ronaldo, the striker bore down on Rustu's goal with absolute authority.

The thin years of desperate, injury-dogged uncertainty in Milan just melted away. He found daylight amid the red shirts of Turkey and his quick shot caught the rueful Rustu by surprise.

He raised one finger to the sky, and a slow smile broke over his round, contented face.

Turkey responded with a spirit and an application which delivered another shaft of reproach to England's reaction to similar circumstances.

Hasan Sas, bold and enraged by the course of events, and Yildiray Basturk, the engine of Bayer Leverkusen, recharged themselves to new levels of energy and enterprise.

But they could not break down Brazil. They could not break the circuit that produced strikes on Rustu's goal at breathtaking speed and with an awesome simplicity.

Whether the disciplined pragmatism of Germany will have more success tomorrow night is the final intriguing question of a World Cup which simply refuses to be arranged in any logical pattern.

But the instinct has to be for Brazil. Their sheer capacity and relish for instant attack seems to be the most persuasive element of all.

That, and the extraordinary aura building around Ronaldo.

Before the tournament, he said: "I played in the last World Cup final because when a doctor said that they could find nothing wrong with me, I knew the Brazilian people would never forgive me if I didn't play.

"It was necessary to live through a nightmare. But now I believe I can win back all I lost.

"I believe I can find something here that I never produced before. I feel that I can reach for something that was never available before. I feel I can touch it."

It seemed like a whistle in the dark a few weeks ago, but now when Ronaldo says, "I feel a strength that is being passed around the team and all the boys have it, we believe we are going to win the World Cup," it is hard to be sceptical.

Not just because this is a remarkably talented player who has already defied formidable odds, but because he is also a Brazilian hero locked into what could well prove to be an epic football poem.

Some of the verse is a little jagged. Some of the phrases may lack an edge of total conviction. But it has a rhythm which makes the blood race and the senses reel. It is certainly Brazilian, which, of course, makes it unique.

- INDEPENDENT

In the print editon of Tuesday's Herald:

We cap off the World Cup with a must for every fan of the beautiful game - a special eight-page section full of photographs and information on Japan/Korea 2002.

We go back to the experts who featured in our World Cup preview section for their views, capture in words all the wonders of the past month, and record in detail how it all unfolded.

Get your copy of a slice of sporting history. Only in Tuesday's Herald.

nzherald.co.nz/fifaworldcup

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