Nick Miller

more people pick a player than they follow that player throughout their career rather than necessarily picking a team, which was kind of the norm when I was a kid.

um so once you can combine those two things um and you know throw in a dash of obsessiveness and um a loose relationship with logic then you get these these people on on the internet and you do i mean the other thing is you don't you also don't know how many of these these uh accounts on instagram or uh or x or wherever it is are actually real yeah you know they could be kind of

bots from various places that could be AI things.

Who knows?

What is pretty clear is that it's no good for any kind of sensible and nuanced debate.

Yeah, I mean, the Portugal coach, Roberto Martinez,

very much nailed his colours to the Ronaldo mask there.

He was asked why he didn't substitute Ronaldo the other day when he clearly wasn't playing well.

And he basically said it wouldn't make sense when we need a goal to sub off one of the greatest golf scorers in football history.

Which, you know, fine.

But you do think you are an elite, highly paid coach.

When something isn't working, you should probably try and think of something else.

He should probably try to come up with some other solution.

So it doesn't seem likely that he's going to be dropped from the team.

I think one of the issues is that there isn't a kind of obvious replacement.

The most natural replacement for him in the Portugal squad is Gonzalo Romas, who hasn't really been playing that much or didn't really play much for PSG last season.

So the strong argument is that you'd rather have

a you know ronaldo who has the potential to do something special rather than this guy who's barely played all season um but you know we've i've i wrote a piece saying that rather shouldn't be in the team i was very very not uh alone in that there's been a lot of similar things written not just at this world cup but in over the past few years

and he's still in the team.

And then, you know, who knows?