Cristiano Ronaldo Denies Training with Substitutes, Choose Gym Sessions with Starters Instead
Cristiano Ronaldo has been crawling through mud throughout the past month, and a new drama has been added to the list. Controversy followed Ronaldo into the Portugal camp after he refused to train with the substitutes on Wednesday and instead preferred a gym session with starters.
The Portuguese captain is 37-year-old currently and is playing his last FIFA World Cup after causing a series of controversies due to his bombshell interview with Piers Morgan earlier, resulting in him being clubless after being sacked by Manchester United.
Controversy has refused to leave the side of the former Manchester United forward after he refused to turn up for training sessions with the substitute players of the team, despite he being one himself in the recent round of 16 victory match against Switzerland.
Ronaldo refuses to train with substitutes
A viral video has been making rounds on social media that showed Ronaldo walking off the pitch instead of celebrating with other Portuguese teammates after the final whistle in their knockout match against Switzerland, despite having a dominant 6-1 victory.
Even after making it into the quarterfinals of the last FIFA World Cup of his lifetime, this week was disturbing, turbulent, and controversy-infested for the Portuguese legend.
Ronaldo became the first male player in the history of the FIFA World Cup to score in five different editions of the World Cup in the inaugural match for Portugal in the group stages. But he couldn’t live up to the mark for the rest of the games.
His lackluster and underwhelming performances and failure to score in back-to-back matches in the later games, added to his blatantly rude response of annoyance to his substitution against South Korea, had resulted in him being dropped off from the starting eleven against Switzerland.
The decisive battle for the quarterfinal against Switzerland, in which Goncalo Ramos, the 21-year-old rookie who played his first ever match as a starter in the World Cup, filled in Ronaldo’s shoes. Instead of being a blunder, this calculated risk turned into a blessing for the team.
Ronaldo’s replacement ended up scoring the first hat trick of the 2022 World Cup, which might mean that Cristiano’s star-studded international career as Portugal’s first priority after he put the country on the football map might be coming to a bitter end.
