There is something vaguely familiar about Cristiano Ronaldo’s form of late. The Juventus forward has scored 20 goals in 26 games so far this season, a stellar return by almost anyone else’s standard but comfortably in keeping with the five-time Ballon d’Or winner’s historical scoring prowess.
In the last couple of months, though, Ronaldo, who turns 35 next week, has embarked upon a scoring streak worthy of consideration among the best periods of production of his entire career. Since 1 December, the Portuguese has scored in all but one of his 11 outings for the Italian champions, returning an incredible 14 goals in that time.
As well as a hat-trick against Cagliari and a brace against Parma, Ronaldo has dispelled any notion of his becoming a flat-track bully in his twilight years with often-crucial goals in fixtures versus Roma, Napoli, Lazio and, in the Champions League, Bayer Leverkusen.
In periods such as these, it feels almost as though Ronaldo is able to turn on the scoring style at will, twisting the tap to unleash the fullness of his powers.
Cristiano Ronaldo has now scored in 8 consecutive games.
• 8 matches
• 12 goals
• 1 hat-trick
• 30 goals for club and country so far in 31 games
• 16 goals in 17 Serie A gamesA few weeks ago so many people on this platform were saying this man is finished. ♂️ pic.twitter.com/GxVen1Sdhm
— FutbolBible (@FutbolBible) January 23, 2020
That was very much the case during the second half of the 2017-18 season, in which, for Real Madrid, he overcame an alarmingly slow start to the campaign – he’d scored just four La Liga goals by mid-January – to score 22 from his final 13 league games and lead Madrid to a third successive Champions League, netting three times, including a stunning bicycle kick, against Juve in the quarter-finals; he finished the season with 44 goals in as many games.
In that instance, Ronaldo’s ramping up in the second half of the season was, in many ways, an acknowledgement of his limitations. At 33, he could no longer sustain his customary superhuman scoring rate over the course of an entire campaign, and instead elected to keep his reserves stocked until the turn of the year, peaking just as the trophies were ready to be handed out.
Ronaldo’s current outrageous run of scoring feels different, though. For the first time in more than a decade and a half, stretching back to those early, inconsistent years as a teenager at Manchester United, he has something to prove.
For an entire generation, discussions of who is the best footballer in the world have centred around a debate between those in Ronaldo’s camp and those who extoll he many virtues of Lionel Messi; everyone else was playing for third-best. That is no longer the case.
While Ronaldo, even in comparatively fallow periods, has maintained a level of play and production remarkable for this stage of his career, he is no longer considered the unanimous rival of Messi in the best-in-the-world stakes. For the first time since 2010, and only the second time since 2006, he was not named in the top two in the Ballon d’Or voting last year, slipping to third, behind Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk, as Messi collected a record sixth award.
Ronaldo – 13 goals in his last 10 Games
Gearing up for UEFA Champions League! Be Scared, Be Very Scared. pic.twitter.com/AZJi6cgDfA
— RMadridbabe (@RMadridBabe) January 22, 2020
Make no mistake: that will have stung Ronaldo’s considerable ego, hence his declining to attend the Ballon d’Or ceremony last December. And it is no coincidence that his uptick in form can be traced back to the same time.
Already driven to further cement his legacy among the game’s greatest-ever players by winning silverware in a fourth country, adding medals in Italy with Juventus to Portugal, England and Spain previously, Ronaldo is now intent on reclaiming his top-dog position among his contemporaries; a standing he will feel he never deserved to lose.
And so comes the relentless, ruthless form in front of goal, proving – if his haul of more the 700 total club and international goals hadn’t already – he is, and remains, arguably the greatest goal-scorer of all time. He plunders indiscriminately to fend off accusations of stat-padding against weaker opposition and to show he is still the man you want your one game-deciding chance to fall to when the stakes are highest.
Through the variance of his strikes he also seeks to reinforce that his skillset is undiminished. Emphatic penalties, fizzing drives from distance, towering headers and bottom-corner arrows from inside the box – he can still do it all, he will have you know. And his gravity-defying header against Sampdoria in December – a beautifully guided finish after he’d leapt so high his hip was level with 5ft 11ins Nicola Murru’s head – was a clear reminder that his other-worldly athleticism subsists.
Nobody was writing Ronaldo off. But, in being voted only the third-best player in the world, he feels slighted. Beware the scorned self-obsessive.
