Cristiano Ronaldo's Portugal saga & Man City's appeal | The Bulletin

Ryan Bailey (0:20)

Welcome to the Total Soccer Show and the latest episode of our Soccer News Roundup, The Bulletin. Today, we're looking at the circumstances around Cristiano Ronaldo leaving the Portugal camp. Will he represent his national team ever again? We don't know. We're checking in with France and Germany and England to see how this extended window has gone so far. And we're going to get the latest on Man City's Rutrose. My name's Ryan Bain. Joining me today, hi, Taylor Ockel. How are you?

Taylor Rockwell (0:45)

That's the legal name for them, right? They're officially documented in court, Rutrose.

Ryan Bailey (0:50)

It's Latin, yeah.

Graham Russell (0:52)

You could convince me of that, because in the Premier League document, as we will cover, there have been some, there's been use of language like sham, and I was like, oh, that's a bit, it's a little bit catty from the Premier League, and people are like, no, that's a legal term. So you could convince me that a Rutrose is a legal term at this point.

Ryan Bailey (1:06)

Is it a legal term? That's court enough. Apparently so.

Graham Russell (1:09)

I keep hearing that from people who would know.

Taylor Rockwell (1:11)

It's why the chamois was such a legally binding piece of television merchandise.

Ryan Bailey (1:18)

Yeah. The judge didn't used to hit a hammer, just have a chamois, running it on the... I'm going to discontinue this riff. We got plenty coming on this episode of The Bulletin. Before we get there, patreon.com/totalsoccershow is a URL. If you put it into your browser of choice, you can get out bonus content. You get bonus episodes, access to our Discord, free drinks at Starbucks for life. I'm not sure about that one, but there's certainly a lot of benefits for patreon.com/totalsoccershow.

Thank you to everybody who supports us via that medium.

Graham Russell (1:52)

I very much enjoyed the bonus episode we recorded yesterday where Joe told us what Scran was at the stadium in Arizona. I don't know what it's called. What's the one in Arizona called?

The desert rat bowl.

Ryan Bailey (2:06)

The dual dome, I think.

Graham Russell (2:06)

The dual dome, yeah. He revealed exclusively on TSS Plus what the food situation was, which is basically why I go to the football forest.

Ryan Bailey (2:14)

There you go. Well, if you want to know what that was, listener, what they eat in the desert during duels, patreon.com/totalsoccershow. Very good. All right. Let's get to our top story for today. Cristiano Ronaldo, 41-year-old, was captain, maybe still captain, not sure, of the Portugal national team left the camp after being an unused substitute against Norway and then finding out who would start against Denmark either. Portugal have a 100 percent record in Nations League without him. After leaving the camp, Ronaldo wrote on social media, in due course, I will tell the truth to all Portuguese people about my reasons for leaving the national team, to which I've always been dedicated. I hope he'll tell us as well, as well as the Portuguese people. But Gramey scored 146 goals in 234 Portugal appearances. Obviously, he's very good.

But it seems like his time with the national team is ending acrimoniously and not in the way he may have hoped.

Graham Russell (3:13)

Yeah, is the truth that he's going to reveal one day in the future that I'm a big man, baby, who should have retired for the national team before now? Because I watched the game that he started against Wales, and Portugal weren't very good. They won that game 1-0. And then I also watched their win over Norway, which was the game that he sat on the bench for the entirety of the game. They were a lot better. I know that's a shocking development, that Portugal are much better without their immobile 41-year-old center forward. But it's true, and so, yes, I think it's quite funny that ordinarily this would be the dominant story over the last week or so, but obviously because of the Man City stuff and Lionel Messi playing his final game for Argentina, which the contrast between those two things is the way that Ronaldo's international career is ending and the way that Messi's international career is ending. It's rather stark, but I think this sort of thing needed to happen for Portugal to be a team that can win the biggest prizes, that can win World Cups, that can win Euros. Of course, there's the Euros in a couple of years' time.

On their overall talent, they should absolutely be a tier one contender for that competition. And they just haven't been in the latter stages of Cristiano Ronaldo's career. So one way or another, whether it was somehow convincing him to be an impact sub, which it seems like George Jesus may have tried to make that argument to him, and Ronaldo hasn't liked that argument at all. And so he's rage quit the international scene. So there we go.