(Madrid) How we meet again! Fourteen years after their joint arrival at Real Madrid, Karim Benzema and Cristiano Ronaldo, the club’s top scorer in history, will find themselves at the end of their football careers in the prestigious Saudi tournament to prolong their friendship there…or to create a little competition.
The atmosphere of 2009: “Novi”, who left Real Madrid to join the recent Saudi champion Al-Ittihad, is following in the footsteps of his fellow brilliant striker from “White House”, who has been playing in Al-Nassr since January.
Ballon d’Or 2022 is 35 years old and football is still on his legs when injuries leave him alone, as he has shown 31 goals this season with Real Madrid. Five times the Golden Ball is in difficulty: I moved to the Gulf in January, and the Portuguese still scores 14 goals in 16 matches … But only his club Al-Nasr finished second in the Saudi championship, behind Benzema’s future club, Al-Ittihad.
Their last match in the same Merengue jersey dates back to August 8, 2018: in Skopje, in the UEFA Cup (swept 2-1) against Manchester United, the club will return to “CR7” a few weeks later, before leaving with a crash. Cristiano Ronaldo replaced Karim Benzema in the 83rd minuteH.
reunion in the eurozone
But the last confrontation between them was more recent: the two friends had found themselves in the shirts of France and Portugal on June 23, 2021 in the group stage of the Euros, and each of them scored two goals in a 2-2.
That evening, we reviewed, for a moment, all the collusion that contributed to the formation of the magical trio dubbed “BBC”, with Benzema, Gareth Bale and Cristiano, between 2013 and 2018 at Real Madrid.
The two players exchanged shirts at halftime, joined the locker room arm in arm, laughing and remaking the world.
“It was a pleasure to see him again. We’ve accomplished a lot together at Real Madrid, scoring many goals,” Benzema said in front of the TF1 microphone.
During eight years together at Real Madrid (2009-2018), the Bron and Funchal native won it all: four Champions Leagues, a Legas League, two Copa del Rey’s Cups, two Spanish Super Cups, two European Super Cups and three Club World Cups. Glasses.
“What competition?”
Evenings of glory that forged strong bonds between the two men. For many years, before becoming a player in the metronome as in 2021-2022, Benzema accepted the ungrateful role of an obliterating striker behind the ogre Ronaldo, who tied the seasons with more than fifty or even sixty goals.
But the Frenchman has always denied any competition.
“If you have someone in your team who scores three or four times as many goals as you, what competition is there? There is no competition. So you have to change your game, that’s what I did. I scored goals, but if I had a chance to shoot and he was in a better position, I’d pass him by,” he said. Because I was sure that he would score,” he told “KB9” in a press interview the team In April 2022.
Even the most tireless of fans will remember that during his early days at Madrid, when Benzema first spotted the white shirt flowing with his name, he couldn’t hold back his tears. Cristiano Ronaldo, who had just arrived from England, offered him his sunglasses to hide his red eyes, and the two ended up laughing while posing for a photo with the other galactic recruits of summer 2009 (Kaka, Xabi Alonso, etc.).
The beginning of a long friendship that was born in Madrid and will continue in Saudi Arabia.
