Six Minutes Was All Ronaldo Needed This Time
Six minutes. That is how long it took Cristiano Ronaldo to answer every question asked of him after Portugal’s flat opening draw, and the rest of this game never recovered from that opening blow.
Portugal beat Uzbekistan 5-0 at NRG Stadium in Houston on June 23, 2026, in their second Group K match at the World Cup. The result lifts Portugal to four points and sets up a final group game against Colombia, while Uzbekistan stay bottom of the group with two defeats from two.
Here is the direct answer for anyone catching up quickly. Portugal beat Uzbekistan 5-0. Ronaldo scored twice, in the 6th and 39th minutes, Nuno Mendes added a free kick in the 17th, an own goal from Abduvohid Nematov made it four in the 60th, and substitute Rafael Leao completed the rout in the 87th. Portugal finished with 2.61 expected goals to Uzbekistan’s 0.24, a number that says this scoreline was not generous.
Portugal lined up in their usual 4-2-3-1, with Ronaldo as the focal point and Bruno Fernandes, Joao Felix and Pedro Neto rotating around him. Uzbekistan set up in a 3-4-3, which on paper offered an extra body at the back to deal with Portugal’s front line. In practice, that back three left both wide centre-backs exposed every time Portugal’s full-backs overlapped, and Joao Cancelo exploited exactly that gap for the opening goal.
Here is the thing about how avoidable that opener was.
Cancelo burst down the right with pace that Uzbekistan’s wide centre-back simply could not match, cut the ball back, and Ronaldo finished from close range. It took six minutes and one clean overlap to expose the entire defensive plan. From there Portugal kept attacking the same flank, with Mendes and Cancelo combining repeatedly to drag Uzbekistan’s back three apart.
Make no mistake, individual quality decided this game, but the patterns behind the goals matter just as much. Mendes’s free kick in the 17th came after Uzbekistan conceded yet another foul on the edge of the box, the same kind of concession that has hurt teams against Portugal’s set-piece takers all tournament. Ronaldo’s second, in the 39th, was a simple ball over the top from Fernandes into the space Uzbekistan’s high line kept leaving open. None of it was complicated. All of it was repeatable.
One thing Uzbekistan did well deserves real credit. Azizjon Ganiev’s disallowed strike in the 29th minute, ruled out for a foul on Cancelo in the buildup, was a genuinely excellent finish from 25 yards, and for a few minutes it looked like the kind of moment that could have changed the tone of the match. Coach Fabio Cannavaro’s side also generated a handful of half chances through Eldor Shomurodov and Otabek Shukurov, even if none carried real weight on the scoreboard.
Roberto Martinez got the response he needed from his captain, and the bigger decision was simply trusting Ronaldo to start at all. After heavy criticism following the draw with DR Congo, Martinez kept faith, paired him with width on both sides, and let Cancelo and Mendes do the early damage so Ronaldo could finish rather than create. That structure, full-backs stretching the back three, attackers waiting centrally, is the blueprint Portugal will need again in the knockouts.
For Cannavaro, the fix is not complicated, even if his squad’s talent gap makes it hard to execute. Stop committing fouls on the edge of the box against a team with two dead-ball specialists, and stop pushing the back three’s wide markers high enough to leave space in behind for overlapping full-backs. Neither fix guarantees a different scoreline against this Portugal side. Both would have made it considerably less one-sided.
Ronaldo needed six minutes to silence a week of noise. Uzbekistan needed considerably longer to silence anything at all.