It will be a fascinating battle at the Fisht Stadium with Ronaldo, at 33, enjoying his best World Cup but Uruguay the only side to come through the group stage in Russia without conceding a goal. The man who has marshalled the best defence in the World Cup so far will relish the task of trying to stop his old foe Cristiano Ronaldo when Uruguay and Portugal meet here tonight. The Madrid derby comes to the shores of the Black Sea in the Last 16 with Uruguayan captain Diego Godin, of Atletico, and his club teammate Jose Maria Gimenez coming up against Real and Portugal’s five-time Ballon d’Or winner. It will be a fascinating battle at the Fisht Stadium with Ronaldo, at 33, enjoying his best World Cup but Uruguay the only side to come through the group stage in Russia without conceding a goal. Godin is an expert at keeping clean sheets, as the leader of an Atletico defence that is the most formidable in the European club game — they kept 34 in all competitions last season — and of a Uruguay side that has not conceded a goal in 2018 in six games.
Uruguay coach Oscar Tabarez claims his team will not “lose sleep” over Cristiano Ronaldo, despite admitting that stopping the Portugal captain is too much to ask of a single player ahead of the World Cup round-of-16 clash in Sochi. The European champions face Uruguay at Fisht Stadium on Saturday, aiming to secure a quarterfinal meeting with either Argentina or France in Nizhny Novgorod next Friday. And Uruguay has identified Ronaldo, with four goals so far at Russia 2018, as the biggest threat to their hopes of a place in the last eight.
But Tabarez, in charge of his fourth World Cup campaign with Uruguay, insists it is pointless to deploy one man to stop Ronaldo. “I believe Cristiano Ronaldo is one of the best strikers in the world,” Tabarez said. “In planning the match, especially focusing on the opponent and considering the level that every player has, it’s all relative. “But what he has on top of all those qualities, he’s the leader of that team, and there is not one single player who can contain him. “Not [Diego] Godin. Nobody. We are going to have to work collectively, but we don’t lose sleep over this. “We will take him seriously, but we will not be obsessed by it. “Nine of the players on the pitch for Portugal are European champions, so that speaks of the quality, and we have been preparing for quite a while.”
Ronaldo, though, has already scored four times at this World Cup, including a hat-trick on his last visit here when Portugal drew 3-3 with Spain. That means he has 85 international goals, more than any other male European player in history.
