“Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings, This painted child of dirt, that stinks and stings.”
Pope, Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot

I bet you thought the same. This little twerp won’t amount to a thing. No bottom to him. Just a collection of tricks and a pocket full of poses. A haircut with football boots. It was not just that the preening femininity seemed so inappropriate to football, it was that he seemed so unutterably silly.

No 7 for Manchester United and yet a person who had come to decorate the game, not to light it up. A fop, a person so conscious of his own handsomeness that your toe aches for the feel of the seat of his shorts, a person for whom the answer to everything lies in his own vanity. In short, a tosser.

We have been forced over the years to change our mind – or at least amend our opinion – about David Beckham, and now we are in the process of doing the same thing with Cristiano Ronaldo. So let us talk about free kicks.

A strange thing happens to a football match when there is a free kick with a shooting opportunity. The entire dynamic of the game changes. It ceases to be a game of movement: 20 outfielders in motion at the same time. Only one man moves. It becomes a game of stillness; a game like cricket.

When a fast bowler moves in to bowl – and we feel this moment most at the start of a session, a match, a series – there is a moment of expectation and everyone on the field is still, all save one.

And then the moment of drama, the ball striking the Australian batsman on the elbow or sailing hideously into the hands of second slip. It was a free kick that made us realise that there was more to Beckham than a floppy fringe and winsome right-foot cross. The occasion was the World Cup of 1998; England had just lost to Romania and needed to beat Colombia to progress.

Beckham had not played against Tunisia and had been a substitute against Romania. It was one of those classic, fraught England nights. Darren Anderton gave England the lead and Beckham got the second with a 30-yard free kick. Simultaneously, we knew that England were through and that Beckham was the real thing.

Ronaldo’s free kick in the 2-0 win over Portsmouth on Wednesday night was a confirmation rather than revelation of his emergence from tosserdom. It was a belter, all right: brilliant not only for power and accuracy, but because it went to the right-footed striker’s right – the wrong side – at extreme pace.

A step-over is the most self-indulgent trick in football, and Ronaldo was inevitably obsessed with this move when he first went to United. But as I watched the initial strutting and prancing of this show-pony, this water-fly, there was one thing that impressed almost despite myself.

Ronaldo made himself a natural target for kicking. And this was not an invitation many spurned. It is an old pro’s rule: you can outplay him and that’s fine, but if your dominance turns to mockery, then you are morally obliged to receive a whack in the shins.

Ronaldo received whack after whack after whack, but like the wobbly man in the nursery, he always got up again. And then he would get the ball, run at the same defender and perform 17 step-overs in rapid succession. There was courage here, courage to go into confrontation, courage to take the pain, courage, above all, to be himself in the most unpromising circumstances.

Beckham and Ronaldo both came back from a World Cup as hate objects. Both of them were advised to move abroad because they would not be able to take the weight of hatred that would be directed at them. Beckham’s disgrace came because he was sent off against Argentina for petulance; Ronaldo because, playing for Portugal against England, he was perceived as having helped to get Wayne Rooney sent off.

On both these occasions, the incident was instrumental in getting England knocked out. Ronaldo’s predicament was made more complex because Rooney was his colleague at Old Trafford. Both Beckham and Ronaldo had made a future in England untenable.

Beckham’s response was to have the season of his life as United won the treble. Ronaldo’s response was to help United to win back the league title, to start scoring goals in quantity, and to be seen as the best player in the world. This season, he has gone better: 27 goals in all competitions.

There is a link between these footballers, and it goes deeper than shirt numbers and haircuts and party tricks. It is courage, sometimes to the point of recklessness. Beckham’s courage in taking the penalty that beat Argentina in his famous World Cup revenge match of 2002 was an example, so was his willingness to carry on taking penalties even though he kept missing them.

For both of them, vanity is not so much a flaw as a part of the package. Vanity is a kind of inspiration. Beckham would have been a lesser footballer without fame and adulation, it is part of the process that fuels him. Ronaldo must fulfil the cravings of his vanity – his need to be the best is so urgent that it has become self-fulfilling.

Now Beckham has received the news that he will not get his 100th England cap as a freebie next week. It is another setback for him to fight against: well, no question but that he’ll do his damnedest. That, as we now know, is the way he is. Ronaldo is probably already a better player than Beckham, his prolific scoring-rate is unanswerable. If he is lucky with injuries, he will have an exceptional career; we know that he has the nature for it.

Beckham has fallen short of greatness. He wanted to be the best player in the world and was never quite in that category. But he had the courage to try. That is the point, he held nothing back. Nothing has wearied him of the struggle. If all England managers have to drop him to show how strong they are, Beckham will do his best to prove them wrong.

Ronaldo is having his tilt at greatness and it will be fascinating to see how far he can get. He will push it as far as he can, if only because he is driven by his own vanity, a force of immense power and purpose.

We measure a writer by his work, not by his nature. When we read a book we don’t have the author’s haircuts or his private follies getting in the way of the words on paper: Proust’s moustache and his cork-lined room and his bizarre feelings about dead rats don’t affect us when we read the books.

But the nature of a footballer’s work means that his distracting silliness can get in the way of our appreciation of his oeuvre. But Beckham is now close to the conclusion of a flawed minor masterpiece and Ronaldo might or might not do better. With both, the silliness conceals the courage and it is courage that counts.