“The last Siuuuuu for the world.” The banner hangs behind one end after Portugal–Uzbekistan, briefly catching the eye before the game pulls it away again. It looks like a gesture from the stands, something improvised, but it ends up framing everything that follows more than the scoreline does.
Ronaldo is still the axis of it. Not in the abstract sense of legacy or narrative, but in the simple way Portugal still end up playing toward him, talking about him, waiting for him to do something that shifts the angle of the match. Martínez rotates the squad, Vitinha and Bernardo Silva circulate through midfield, Leão drifts in and out of the game, but the attention keeps sliding back to the same place. It’s been like this for years. The names around him change; the focus doesn’t.
The week before the game carried the usual noise. Leadership, hierarchy, whether this is still Ronaldo’s team or something shared now. João Neves was pulled into it after a couple of comments that travelled further than they should have. It filled the space for a few days, then the match started and none of it really mattered in the same way. He scored twice.
The first was simple enough, a finish inside the box after the move opened up. The second came at the far post, late in a counterattack when the defensive line had already been stretched apart. No drama in either moment, nothing that asks to be replayed endlessly. Just goals that arrive, as they still tend to do. With them came the records. First player to score in six consecutive World Cups. A number that doesn’t really behave like a statistic anymore, more like a timeline. And then Portugal’s top scorer in World Cup history, passing Eusébio, whose name usually sits outside this kind of comparison but here gets absorbed into it anyway.
There’s a pattern to it now. For most players, Eusébio is where the conversation stops. For Ronaldo, it becomes another step. Another marker that doesn’t hold its position for long. He’s almost 41, but that detail feels less relevant than the consistency of it. He still gets into the same spaces, still expects the same chances, still reacts to the game as if the next one is always there. The reaction around him is different — less surprise now, more anticipation than anything else, as if people are watching not only what he does, but what it triggers next.
Portugal play with that layer running through everything. The match and what it might become are harder to separate. Uzbekistan don’t really alter any of it. They were never going to. The sharper tests are elsewhere, where space disappears quicker and decisions carry more weight. This was just another entry in the sequence. The banner stays there in the background, not insisting on anything. “The last Siuuuuu for the world.” It doesn’t resolve the evening, it just sits on it for a while, before the game moves on again.
By the end, the World Cup still feels slightly unfinished without him at its centre. Messi, Mbappé, Haaland, Kane, Lamine Yamal — the outline is already there. Ronaldo steps into it with two goals and two more records, and for a moment it feels complete. Then it loosens again, like it always does.