Cristiano Ronaldo, an elastico, and the beauty of a singular moment

“There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it's one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again.”

Douglas Adams is a magnificent story-teller, a man of unparalleled imagination and as usual, he described it better than most people could. That one moment. The true brilliance of his words, though, lies in the fact that it works equally well for when you start to fall in love, again.

That one, singular, moment when you know... just know... that the love is back.

It was a tiny thing, a flip-flap, as the Brazilians call it, of that right foot, a nutmeg, and off he went... the defender grasping at thin air in his wake. That it didn’t amount to anything doesn’t really matter. If anything, it adds to the charm of it – that elastico stands on its own.

As a singular moment. It was terribly beautiful.

The elastico itself was perfect... start from a virtual standstill. Check. Move the ball to the right to make the defender go to his left. Check. Whip the ball back to the left almost instantaneously and through the legs of the defender in one smooth motion. Check.

Rivellino himself has never done it better.

Simply brilliant from Ronaldo. pic.twitter.com/GateFP5LZr

— jamal adams fan club (@danny_g13) February 18, 2017

But the key to its beauty lay in the fact that it was also a moment of great significance.

I can hear you think, rage, now. What? One Moment? One Elastico? Isn’t this blowing things out of proportion just because it’s Cristiano Ronaldo? Lionel Messi does things like this every other minute and this fellow does one trick and the whole world goes nuts? Pshaw!

That’s the thing with this, though, it doesn’t matter what Messi does, or can do, or did once upon a time. For once, this wasn’t about Ronaldo vs Messi.

This moment was all Cristiano Ronaldo.

As he whipped the ball in-between the unfortunate David Lopez’s legs, he also opened a time-travelling portal with it that transported us back a decade, where all of a sudden that Maggi-haired, pockmarked, little kid in red was standing in front of us and the late great Eusebio’s words sprung to life,

He has magic in his boots. The first thing you notice about him is that he is incredibly quick and very, very powerful for such a young man. He has great, close control and his technique is excellent. He believes he can do anything with the ball, and that confidence makes him very special indeed.

You could see the magic in his boots once again.

Like a lot of us, I too, had first fallen in love with the man’s penchant to do the unpredictable, the joy he took in doing things most normal people can’t even conceive in their minds, the talent and the sheer brilliance of a man, who by the end of his career at Manchester United was such a lethal, and joyous, marriage of entertainment and pure game-winning-effectiveness that even the normally reserved Sir Bobby Charlton couldn’t help but wax lyrical,

“He does things I have never seen from any other player and it really is marvellous to watch. It takes a great player to grab the bull by the horns and make things happen, but he has done it repeatedly.”

But as his career progressed, as that incessant rivalry with the little Argentine kept picking up steam, he started morphing into a different animal, a goal-getter extraordinaire who year after year traded in his tricks and flicks and got in return an ever increasing tally in the only column that really matters in football. Like his great friend at United, Rio Ferdinand said,

He liked taking liberties when he first came, taking people on, making people look silly and doing skills before coming back to beat them again. His whole thing when he first signed was about showmanship, he'd listen to the fans when he'd do that bit of skill, when he'd do that step-over.

Whereas then there was that turning point around that time when it was about goals, assists. Then he became the game-changer, rather than the showman. That's that maturity and the penny dropping."

It had been the right path, of course, as he ascended a peak of greatness that few before him have even laid their eyes on.

But a lot of the pure love had gone away. It had become increasingly difficult to see just the tantrums and the shouting-at-teammates-for-not passing without any of that old maverick entertainment to back it up.

And then he did this.

For the first time in nearly two seasons, he wasn’t just sulking around, hanging on to the last defender, waiting for a ball to poach into the net like an ersatz Pippo Inzaghi. He was actually creating magic with those boots again, he was grabbing the proverbial bull by its horns.

That rivalry with Messi – I apologise for coming back to that again – is often described as the naturally skillful one vs the hard-working one. While Leo Messi is without a shadow of a doubt the most skillful player currently kicking a ball around on this planet of ours, this oversimplification has the effect of making us forget just how damn good Ronaldo is with the ball at his feet.

His recent displays - remember that grimace-inducing exhibition against Kashima Antlers in the Club World Cup final where he bagged a hat-trick but could barely do a stepover properly? – haven’t helped the cause... and that skill, that entertainment factor was fast becoming a thing of nostalgia.

Then the elastico happened.

This singular moment mattered.

It showed that he still had it. It also showed the one thing that has defined his career like no one else’s. His ability to constantly adapt, and work on his faults. Jose Mourinho had once said of the man he considers to be the ‘best in the world’:

“I had only one problem with him, very simple, very basic, which was when a coach criticises a player from a tactical viewpoint trying to improve what in my view could have been improved. And at that moment he didn't take it very well because maybe he thinks he knows everything and the coach cannot help him to develop more.”

For the past couple of seasons (and a bit further back even), he had been attempting to become an unorthodox centre-forward, someone that different coaches had to adapt their systems to. At times, the coaches, especially his latest, Zinedine Zidane, had had to field a formation of 10 men + Ronaldo, arguably because the Portuguese superstar had come to believe he knew everything and that he need not be told what to do ...just like Mourinho had stated.

Zidane, though, is not a man to be underestimated. One of the greatest footballing brains to have ever set foot on a professional pitch, it appears that he has coaxed Ronaldo to change. And now, 32 years old and officially “the best player in the world”, he appears to have done it. At the brink of becoming irrelevant and more harmful than useful, he's adapted. Yet again.

It’s a mark of the man’s greatness that he’s shown the willingness, and the ability, to do it. Over the past couple of games (admittedly a small sample, but then hope springs eternal, even if it leaps out of just a drop), he’s hugged the touchline so that his team’s 4-3-3 remain just that and not a chaotic 4-3-1-1-1, he’s crossed the ball well, passed it around slickly (as opposed to the usual alternative of having a pop from anywhere and everywhere), inter-changed flanks with easy fluidity and most importantly, most endearingly, he’s shown us all that Ryan Giggs’ old quote has lost none of its relevance,

“When Cristiano Ronaldo gets the ball, you can just leave him to it while he beats player after player.”

If you still doubt it, ask Kalidou Koulibaly, the highly-rated Napoli defender who was sat on his backside by one of Ronaldo’s trademark flick-backs this mid-week, or indeed just ask poor ol’ David Lopez.

You see, that’s why the elastico, that singular moment, was so very significant, why it matters so much. It had a beauty to it that transcended its aesthetic perfection. It made us fall in love with Cristiano Ronaldo all over again.