BRENT A GOB: This week, Harry Brent’s taking aim at Cristiano Ronaldo after his World Cup disasterclass for Portugal, and at the penalty rules that unfairly punish goalkeepers
What do Cristiano Ronaldo and Crème Brûlée have in common… They’re both completely cooked at the top.
I usually avoid starting these columns with a terrible joke, but judging by Ronaldo’s performance against DR Congo, that’s exactly what the former Manchester United and Real Madrid man’s tournament out in North America is shaping up to be.
That narcissistic porcelain-toothed geriatric has derailed any chance Portugal might have had of winning the World Cup by doing a Keir Starmer: stubbornly dragging out his inevitable departure despite being a completely ineffective berk. Seriously, he’s a bigger waste of space than Everton’s trophy cabinet.
His monstrous ego is crippling Portugal the same way a wheel clamp cripples a Volkswagen. He’s parasitic in that sense – sucking the life out of the team to feed his own selfish lust for personal glory.
It’s time for him to sod off and hang it up. It’s getting embarrassing now.
Penalty VARce
I’m so fed up with seeing goalkeepers getting punished for coming off their line during penalties. It’s as dumb a rule as the one Chelsea exploited to sell their women’s team to themselves so they could dodge a PSR points deduction.
Penalty takers are allowed to do a full-blown salsa routine during their run-up – hopping, skipping, stuttering and bloody cartwheeling if they fancied it – just to put the keeper off.
But God forbid the bloke between the sticks creeps just two millimetres forward to narrow the angle by the width of Thomas Tuchel’s spindly legs. If he does, the VAR nerds in their windowless bunker have a meltdown of Kevin Keegian proportions.
Look at what happened in England’s 4-2 win over Croatia. Harry Kane had his spot-kick saved after a stuttering run-up, then booting the ball with all the grace of a man trying to kick a frozen turkey down a hallway.
But because the Croatian keeper’s big toe was an atom over the line, VAR handed Kane the sort of undeserved bailout the banks got in 2008. Yes, there was a bit of encroachment too, but the stay-on-your-goal-line rule is just a safety blanket for strikers who have the shooting accuracy of Alec Baldwin on the set of Rust.
It’s completely killing the drama. Penalties are supposed to be a nerve-shredding battle of wits, but this rule reduces them to more of a foregone conclusion than Danny Murphy putting people to sleep with his commentary.