Christiano Ronaldo for Portugal (vs Czech Republic), June 11 2008

The whole grubby "Ronaldo to Madrid" saga is taking all of the usual ups and downs at the moment (you know: Madrid whisper sweet nothings at a player under contract to someone else and insinuate that the move is on to the press; the press print stories and elicit angry denials from the club holding the player's registration; the player comes out with his desire to play for Madrid; Madrid innocently claim they have definitely not tried to tap up the player; other club threatens to let the player rot in the reserves for the duration of his contract... then sell him for the maximum amount of money. Everyone's happy?)

I was interested to read this piece in the Guardian by Daniel Taylor though. He tells the story of some petulant behaviour by Ronaldo at a press conference at the Manchester United training ground to commemorate the anniversary of the Munich air crash. The behaviour itself is probably not so surprising and the article is designed to reinforce your view of Ronaldo as a petulant little shit and generally unpleasant piece of work. The really interesting bit is when Taylor says:

"It was such an unpleasant scene the journalists decided not to write about it because we had been invited to the training ground to cover a far more important subject and, when you have sat with men as noble as Charlton, Foulkes, Albert Scanlon, Harry Gregg and Kenny Morgans and seen the hurt in their eyes, it felt incongruous to veer off-track."

I can kind of see what he means, but as the commentators on the post point out, are the football press pack really so complicit that they didn't think this worthy of comment and collectively decided to sit on it? What other stories are they sitting on?

The story doesn't make Christiano Ronaldo look terribly good, but neither does it do the press pack any favours.