Good Round, Bad Round: Cristiano Ronaldo’s jumping, social media losers

He's good at football, is Cristiano. That's Good Round, Bad Round's searing analysis of the great man, after his header helped Portugal into the Euro 2016 final. Yep, we've just checked, and he's definitely good at football.

He's also good at jumping. By golly is he good at jumping. According to the Daily Mail, the height of Ronaldo's header was 8ft 7, he jumped 2ft 6 in the air, hung there for a gravity-defying 0.7 seconds, and the effort flew off his noggin at 44.3 mph. Not bad.

And as Chris Coleman said, there's not much you can do if someone can jump higher than you...

Well, sure, they lost, and these fans couldn't be there to see the semi-final against Portugal, but man alive this lot made a stirring noise at the Principality Stadium. Usually associated with rugby, to non-Welsh ears 'Land Of My Fathers' does sometimes carry with it the taint of big men in bad cotton shirts belching the beer they're allowed to drink in the grounds, but if Euro 2016 has done nothing else, it's freed this absolute belter of a song from association with one of the silly sports.

At least a couple of Russia's players seemed to have a nice time after their elimination. Stories emerged that Alexander Kokorin and Pavel Mamayev took some time out to visit a nightclub in Monaco, and while there supposedly spent in the region of £200,000 on 500 bottles of champagne, complete with fireworks on each bottle, caroused into the night and generally thoroughly enjoyed themselves. A spokesman for big Vlad Putin declared their alleged behaviour a “shameless display of conceit”.

However, that story turned out not to be entirely accurate. “Somebody was celebrating their birthday and we were simply there,” Kokorin told Sports.ru. “Naturally, everybody saw the bottles and heard the Russian anthem, but why put all this on us?” Why indeed, and while this might sound like a standard footballer denial, they had some back-up to their story.

“These two guys, Kokorin and Mamaev, came for dinner with their wives,” wrote former QPR owner and F1 chap Flavio Briatore in Instagram. “After dinner they stayed in the club to smoke shisha. There was a private party organised by some Russians. They recognised Kokorin and Mamaev and as a sign of respect, as they are fans, they started sending them bottles of champagne and they asked our DJ to play the Russian national anthem.

“Then other Russian clients also wanted to show their respect and sent the two players other bottles, so Kokorin and Mamaev had the table full of bottles. The funny thing is that the guys are not even drinking alcohol.”

That clears that up then. But still, at least they were still having a nice time, even if it was without booze, and didn't let the simple act of not doing their jobs very well impinge on them having a normal life.

Still, given that England's players, manager and press officer got it in the neck for crimes as wide, varied and heinous as 'having a headrest on their plane seat' and 'buying their mum a sink', one can only imagine the reaction had they spent £200,000 on champagne. Even if they hadn't.

All a bit of fun, eh? This ball boy wasn't content with simply chasing after errant clearances, so decided to get involved in the Portugal team photo. At least Cristiano enjoyed it.

Given Cristiano Ronaldo got it in the neck for dismissing Iceland as defensive non-triers, it's only fair that we give the comments from Mats Hummels upon Germany's elimination by France a brief airing.

“The level at this European Championship was not what we had hoped for,” said Hummels. “There were many teams who didn’t want to do anything with the ball and just packed men behind the ball.”

Well boo-hoo Mats, boo-hoo. And his manager was at it too. “I think 24 teams are too many,” said Joachim Low. “The World Cup’s going to be increased to 40 teams and it’s getting more and more, and that’s a problem in the long term. Sometimes you get the feeling it’s not doing football any good. The quality is suffering.”

Never write off the Germans. Unless they reach the semi-finals, that is...

(Just a little joke there, German fans)

It's probably counter-productive to actually show them here, for this merely gives them the sort of attention they're after (plus we here at Good Round, Bad Round are 100% against cyber-heckling of any sort...), but there were plenty of people on The Internet who were bafflingly indignant about the idea of Wales enjoying an open-top bus parade around Cardiff after their heroic campaign.

A general summary of the comments on Twitter went something like 'lol parade for finishing fourth, they're small time' or variants thereof, some being rather less polite than that. Like we said, we're not linking to them here, you can find them if you wish, but if not just trust us: they were there.

Now we don't want to make sweeping generalisations about people we've never met before, but one can only imagine the sort of joyless lives these people lead to begrudge the Wales players and fans celebrating the achievement of a lifetime. Remember, the last time Wales qualified for a major international tournament was 1958, a generation and more ago, in which time they have endured agony upon agony, disappointment on disappointment and more years of drudgery than most could possibly imagine. Most of their fans were utterly delighted that Wales even got to Euro 2016, were overjoyed when they won a game, ecstatic when they qualified from the group, so reaching the semi-finals...well, the sense of limitless pride and enormous wonderment must have been overwhelming.

But no, they shouldn't celebrate this achievement at all. Because some misanthropes with social media accounts think it's small time.

Of course, the governing body of football in Europe must do their utmost to ensure the safety of everyone involved, but Good Round, Bad Round reckons they took that a little too far this time, when ahead of Wales v Portugal they banned a little tradition that the Welsh team had introduced, namely getting their kids to have a little kickaround on the pitch after each game.

Sure, UEFA have to make sure the pitch is OK, but we're not sure a bunch of four-year-olds running around it a bit is going to churn the grass up too much. Well, not more than it is already, anyway.

Sure, his team are through to the final, but Giroud faced his absolute worst nightmare against Germany: acres of space, a wide open half of football for him to show his pace and speed through on goal.

Alas, he's slower than coastal erosion, and took so long to get the ball under control and fly through on goal that Benedikt Howedes had time to chase him down, change his boots, file his tax return, make a five-course dinner, finish 'Infinite Jest' and then make the tackle.