Ahead of Al-Nassr’s game against Al-Ittihad, I was tasked to run the live blog as Cristiano Ronaldo tried to win his first trophy since moving to Saudi Arabia. Ronaldo is undoubtedly one of the biggest names in world football and we wanted to cover such an event, especially as it wasn’t shown live on TV in the UK.

Fortunately, Sky Sports live streamed the action on YouTube, which made me able to watch. But, with no other football occurring, it felt many football fans were glued into watching Ronaldo and if he could lift silverware. We set the blog live for an hour before kick-off, allowing us enough time to build up and to ensure it can get as high as possible on Google. As the match kicked off, I posted live updates between every two to five minutes, as well as posting relevant tweets.

It is important to keep the blog as up to date as possible and I was able to do that throughout, with the blog peaking between 200 and 300 concurrents during the match. But, in fact, the piece was at its highest once the match had finished as Ronaldo’s Al-Nassr ended up falling to a 3-1 defeat. The headline at the time helped, as we titled it “Cristiano Ronaldo: Familiar foe masterminds Saudi Super Cup exit as goalless start extends”, adding extra spice to make the reader click it. 

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