In the end, Cristiano Ronaldo's World Cup career ended in a massively disappointing fashion. Not only did Portugal exit at the hands of a less fancied Morocco side, but the forward also found himself out of favour in their last couple of games.
Portugal possessed one of the most talented squads in the tournament, but it was clear that they were not performing to their best in the group stages.
Once they dropped their captain for the last-16 clash against Switzerland, the team looked transformed. They were more dynamic in attack, pressing from the front and scoring six goals along the way.
They could not replicate that performance against Morocco, with Ronaldo coming off the bench before the hour mark but failing to make much of an impact.
Gary Neville claims Cristiano Ronaldo was let down by Portugal
Gary Neville has been very slow to criticise Cristiano Ronaldo over the last couple of seasons, although he has done so on a few occasions in recent times. However, he believes that Portugal have not handled the situation well at the World Cup.
Speaking on the Sky Sports World Cup Podcast, he said that they should have accommodated him in the team the way that Argentina are doing for Lionel Messi.
Messi has been managed by Argentina in terms of how the rest of the group have come around him, and they completely play to his strengths. Whereas with Portugal and with Santos having known Cristiano for so long, I thought he'd have done the same.
It feels to me like something has happened within the tournament that's meant that plan has changed and Santos has thought 'I need to leave you out'. But once you leave Cristiano out, it's not just leaving another player out. It becomes a global story.
I actually felt sorry for Cristiano in the end, when he was walking down that tunnel in tears. That's never a good image. You know he's thinking, 'this is it, I'm never going to play in this tournament again'.
I wouldn't class it as an underachievement from Ronaldo, I'd say it's an overachievement that he's doing what he's doing at the age of 37, it's just the way it ended with him being out of the team.
In the end, I thought Portugal were really poor in that last half-hour against Morocco. If you look at how to chase a football match, this was nothing to do with Ronaldo, it was more to do with Bernardo Silva and Bruno Fernandes and the way they played in the game, they were so deep and found themselves having to play impossible passes, or just recycle the ball side to side.
I was more disappointed with Portugal as a collective than I was with Ronaldo.
This doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Argentina do indeed put players around Lionel Messi to lessen the amount of running he is asked to do, but there is good reason for that. He is far and away their most important player and has repeatedly produced for them during this tournament.
The case of Cristiano Ronaldo is a different one.
He was very poor in the group stages, failing to have much of an impact up front. As well as that, Portugal had a number of options in their squad that were arguably more effective players at this points in their career. That was evidenced by Goncalo Ramos' performance against the Swiss, with the Benfica man scoring a hat-trick in the game after replacing Ronaldo.
Whereas Messi also elevates the players around him, the same cannot be said of the former Manchester United man. This season, he has showed that he is more likely to be a disruptive presence in a squad than a positive one.
It goes without saying that the Portuguese performed better as a group than he did as an individual, even if Neville believes this was not the case.
Far from Portugal letting Cristiano Ronaldo down, his behaviour and performances during the tournament mean that an opposite claim would be a bit closer to the truth.
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