With J Hutcherson -- Shocked looks all around, but Cristiano Ronaldo is now officially the best player on the planet. Well, at least according to France Football Magazine. As good as Ronaldo obviously is, there's still the feeling that we're in an era without enough truly elite players.
There are those who still put up Spain '82 as the height of competition for recent World Cup play, even if we're stretching 'recent' to before Cristiano Ronaldo was born. Switch to the club game, and the time frame pushes up a decade, but also doesn't throw up serious candidates past the Milan era of the early 90's.
Considering the relative disappointment of Real Madrid's galactico teams, and there's something to be said for the age where every major club and player is a superstar in theory. In practice, this continues to be more about image than substance.
Real's galacticos had the last two candidates for greatest of a generation, the other Ronaldo and Zinedine Zidane. Both had issues with their exits and neither maintained the mystique of say Eric Cantona.
Cantona had no claim to best in his era because of his National Team issues, but he managed to create an image that he was beyond the pettiness of the sport. When everyone involved was grabbing for money in the mid-90's, he was the one who put himself in a different category, the sportsman for lack of a better term. He did this while being Nike's principle endorser in England and calling himself Eric The King.
As tricks go, that's a pretty good one. Marco van Basten just played better than everyone else. Think where his career would have gone if the tackle from behind rules had been changed earlier. Maradona is simply beyond comparison at this point, a player who could make the game about the individual in a way we seldom see.
Part of the reason why this hasn't continued through the current era is a lack of elite strikers capable of maintaining their game through multiple seasons. It's almost the expectation that elite strikers will tail off badly.
In their place, we get skill players working out of the midfield or on the flank. That's Ronaldo, without question the best of them. That might include the earlier eras of wingers that gave us a player perennially in the argument for greatest of all time, George Best.
Unlike so many run at the defender players at all levels of the game, Ronaldo acts past the beat. You don't see him break free and seem slightly surprised. That's as much a difference as anything else he brings to the game. Right now, it's more than enough. It's the working definition of superstar.
It's just a shame that the current era isn't deeper. Then we could see what Ronaldo would do against the elite by any definition. That includes defenders and keepers. Right now, he needs company.
Comments, questions, solutions to problems that have yet to present themselves. Please, tell me all about it.
