There was one sight at the end of the France-Portugal match that redeemed one’s faith in the basic goodness of footballers. Cristiano Ronaldo had been the target of much booing and jeering and he didn’t help his cause when France won the penalty. He rushed to the area and entered into a long and heated argument with Thierry Henry, whom Ricardo Carvalho had fouled to concede the spot-kick. That only increased the volume of the subsequent barracking. Yet when the match ended, and he stood alone, in tears, near the centre-circle, who should seek him out but Henry. He called out the young winger’s name but Ronaldo didn’t hear, so Henry walked up to him and embraced him with obvious warmth for around 30 seconds. Henry himself has been under a cloud for diving earlier in the tournament but this was a grand gesture, from one of the game’s most elegant players to a rising star, and more the Henry we know and admire. Their countries were adversaries on the day, their clubs are perpetually at daggers drawn but the senior player recognised the junior’s efforts in the match and anguish at losing it, and saw it fit to commiserate.

The tournament has, in fact, been full of situations where clubmates, current or former, have been rival national captains. That was the case on Wednesday; Luis Figo no longer plays for Real Madrid but he was one of the Galacticos and his interaction with Zinedine Zidane, both before the match and after, was warm. So too was David Beckham’s with Dwight Yorke, both alumni of the Old Trafford school, both graduates summa-cum-laude of the Class of ’99. Beckham met up with Figo, too, in the quarter-final, but that was marked by both men staring resolutely ahead in the tunnel before the match. There was another I didn’t see, Zidane and Raul before the second-round match.Water wars

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