Wayne Rooney was told to expect a message from Cristiano Ronaldo after joking in a live studio discussion that the Portugal captain would have been “raging” at the sight of Kylian Mbappe, Erling Haaland and Lionel Messi all finding the net. Olivier Giroud turned to Rooney in the studio and warned him: “You’re going to receive a text, Wayne, be careful,” a line that landed because the conversation was happening just before Ronaldo’s opening World Cup match against the DR Congo.
The exchange gave Rooney a chance to set out exactly why he thought Ronaldo would hate watching the numbers pile up elsewhere. “He’ll have been raging,” Rooney said, before adding: “In a good way.” The point was simple enough: Ronaldo, in his sixth World Cup at 41, has never been a player to sit comfortably while others steal the headlines. Mbappe had scored braces for France, Haaland had done the same for Norway and Messi had delivered a hat-trick, all of which fed the idea that Ronaldo would want a response of his own.
Giroud backed that up by sketching out the version of Ronaldo he expected to see against the DR Congo. He said Ronaldo had “the capacity to be efficient,” that his “presence and aura in the box is massive” and that his team-mates would be looking for him. Rooney agreed that the old formula still mattered most. “He knows where he can be effective,” he said, arguing that Ronaldo would not be best served coming deep to dribble past players and that his value would come from getting between the goal and the defenders.
That is where the friction in the discussion sat. Giroud said Ronaldo did not have the same legs as before and that he could play an hour, while the broader expectation was that he would not complete 90 minutes. That makes sense of the coaching logic behind the match plan and the player’s own ambition at the same time: Ronaldo was still chasing the trophy missing from his cabinet, still trying to add to a career total that had reached 143 goals, and still close enough to the edge of another record that one more World Cup goal would draw him level with Eusebio.
Giroud, who said he had 57 goals himself, put the rest of the argument in plain terms: Ronaldo would create if he stayed in the box, and then Goncalo Ramos could come on and make his own headlines. The only unanswered part is the one Rooney has now been handed in public. Giroud predicted the text; what no one could confirm in the studio was whether Ronaldo actually sent it.
