Portugal may have lost, but Santos still committed to the game against the diva Ronaldo

You must see yourself as a desperate character who emerges into the harsh light of a dreary winter morning on the wrong side of town after a night dive. You’re out of money, out of cigarettes, and struggling to remember who you are and where you live.

In fact, Santos can seem so deeply melancholic at times that it’s hard to believe he’s not a wasted and wounded soul, but the hugely successful manager of a team that won the European Championship in 2016.

Unfortunately, after yesterday’s debacle – when Portugal’s performance in the quarter-final defeat by Morocco was almost beyond description – he knew that success was just a success
cruel illusion.

How did he get to be like this? Why does Santos look like the manager, not of Portugal but of a 1970s League of Ireland side plagued by the experience of constant beating and the prospect of imminent bankruptcy? I have a theory…

Yes, on the whole things have been going very well for Portugal under his leadership. But Santos always knew that dark day was waiting for him somewhere down the line – the day he would have to announce to Cristiano Ronaldo that he was dropped.

It can be difficult for a manager to tell a player they’ve been dropped. To tell one of the most incorrigible narcissists in human history that he will be on the bench — maybe even during a World Cup — would shake us all a little.

Sure enough, when Portugal went butchering Switzerland without Ronaldo, a confirmed Santos could perhaps have been forgiven for celebrating his triumph by running down the sidelines, taking off his jacket, shirt and tie and driving her insane would have waved overhead to happily take the yellow card for it.

But that would be so out of character as Ronaldo accepting his demotion with the maturity and grace of the 37-year-old man he is.

It was all the more difficult for everyone because it was so obvious – paradoxically, the more Ronaldo insisted on his absolute right to start any game, the more obvious it became that he no longer understood that football is a team game. He had always struggled with this concept, but now it has gained a new clarity

Indeed, there is the ultimate paradox that a man so keenly aware of the camera and always looking his best seemed almost childishly unaware that his rude behavior under the circumstances was a bad look is – that everyone but him can see that he’s not as good as he was, say, 10 years ago. Or even two years ago.

Ronaldo would only be supported by those who don’t care about football anyway, who only admire it as a cultural phenomenon.

Yes, Santos might have seen horrible things, but with Portugal having a real chance of winning the World Cup, he wouldn’t have a cultural phenomenon as a first name on the team list. Or even the 11th name.

Faced with the outrageous rejection of his awesomeness, Ronaldo has also seen a resurgence in comparisons to Messi. Because Ronaldo loses his dignity towards the end, it is argued that Messi is the one who faces the final curtain like the true superstar. I personally have never felt
Ronaldo was pretty much in the same class as Messi, who – for me, Bill – is the best footballer we’ve ever seen.

But I think they both let themselves down in the way they left. They both essentially sell themselves to Saudi Arabia, with Ronaldo reportedly signing to play there for dumb money and Messi taking the Saudi shilling as an ‘ambassador’.

I know they can do whatever they want with their size, but I’m also free to think less of them for it. These things make a difference. Rory McIlroy powerfully argued in his interviews with Paul Kimmage that there is something fundamentally twisted about athletes who are already ridiculously wealthy by selling a piece of themselves to such scoundrels.

Certainly the Saudis seem to think it makes a difference. Because of course it does. So if you’re still asking me at this World Cup whether I should choose between Messi and Ronaldo, I’ll take Fernando Santos – a man who, without changing his expression of utter desperation in the least, actually championed the game against a superpower. For a few short, radiant moments that are now gone forever.

What is all this about echo chambers being bad for?

Ever since the richest man in the world bought Twitter and immediately set about making the best of it—like they do—we’ve learned at least one thing that defies conventional wisdom.

“Echo chambers,” it has been said for years, are one of the curses of social media. “Echo chambers” allegedly caused the polarization of opinion, with one side never hearing the other side of the story. Instead, we just anchor ourselves more in our own certainties, and that’s supposed to be bad.

But sometimes it’s not bad.

Sometimes it’s good.

If you’re an Iranian dissident great at defying the “moral police,” you need all the echo chambers you can get. If you’re trying to organize against voter suppression in America, the echo chamber is your only man. Such things are undoubtedly good.

But we need not cite such hard cases. In most areas of our lives, we feel the “echo room” not only as something good, but as indispensable for a reasonable life. We don’t go to bars knowing we’re going to get into a crazy drunk fight with someone we don’t like.

Yes, there was a reason we all loved this comedy series set in an establishment “where everyone knows your name and they’re always glad you came.” was cheers also just an “echo room”?

We don’t join a golf club if we don’t like golf just to find out what golfers are like and to understand them better. We don’t buy Wolfe Tones albums because we feel an obligation to confront the Republican mindset.

So the hack cliché about the “echo chambers” on social media is classic “bothsidesing”. It equates the interactions of people with a fairly wide range of opinions with those of Dingbat O’Dipstick, who ordered the execution of Dr. Fauci demands.

What Elon Musk is doing is amplifying O’Dipstick’s voice – trying to lessen and disrupt the fabled “echo chamber” with its advanced purpose support systems.

So my timeline now has multiple posts each day from these guys that Elon likes, reminding you of how Jehovah’s Witnesses might be at your door with their “literature”. At least the Jehovah’s Witnesses had the decency to knock.

Brilliant McVie, a true rock ‘n’ roll great

Another great talent has left the rock ‘n’ roll hotel with the death of brilliant Fleetwood Mac singer-songwriter Christine Perfect (later McVie).

Americans who fought in World War II have been dubbed The Greatest Generation, and there is a growing need for rockers of a certain age to be given such a title.

Except for one thing: Your chances of surviving the Great Fire of 1939-45 were slightly better than your chances of making it out of LA’s rock ‘n’ roll scene in the 1970s. And Fleetwood Mac in particular.

I don’t know how they did it.