There have been plenty of experts consulted lately about Cristiano Ronaldo’s value and his remaining match-winning capabilities in this, his 21st year as a senior player. A handful, voters for the Ballon d’Or, recognised that he still had enough to rank as the world’s 20th best footballer during 2021/22.
A day before Monday’s ceremony for the award, pundits had been opining on Ronaldo’s ostentatious grumbles at being substituted in the second half of Manchester United’s goalless draw with Newcastle United.
One expert declining to offer a critical view on Ronaldo’s importance for his club is Antonio Conte, who takes Tottenham Hotspur to Old Trafford Wednesday evening.
“I am the last person who should answer this question,” joked the Spurs manager on being asked about Ronaldo’s current status. “Last season he scored a hat-trick against us! We lost 3-2 to him, not to Manchester United. So, fingers crossed this time.”
Ronaldo’s three goals against Tottenham back in mid-March can look, in the sweep of events since, like the last bulkhead against a tide of personal decline.
The last meeting of the clubs briefly cast the Portuguese as the saviour United believed they had retrieved when he returned to club for a second spell. He gave them the lead with a superb drive from outside the Tottenham penalty area. He restored the lead with a right-place-right-time tap-in. He guaranteed the three points after a second Spurs equaliser with a thumping header.
Two matches later, Ronaldo scored another match-winning hat-trick, against Norwich City, part of a sequence of nine league goals in six games. He was named the Premier League’s Player of the Month.
A top-four finish was then still a United target until their season’s stop-start momentum wheezed again. Part of the reason Conte can look back with a light-hearted laugh on the day Ronaldo performed his one-man destruction is that Tottenham later overtook United in the race for Champions League qualification.
After Ronaldo struck his hat-trick, Spurs had been left trailing fifth-placed United by five points and by three rungs in the table.
That seems a while ago, given that Conte’s Tottenham are now compiling a best-ever start to a Premier League season. For all the positive signals that Erik ten Hag, the new manager, has generated over a run of five United wins in seven league outings, his team look light on goalscoring punch ahead of an intense few days.
After he cut short, on 72 minutes, Ronaldo’s second start of the league campaign against Newcastle, the United manager explained the decision as part of a strategy to keep his attacking players fresh, with Spurs at home then a trip to Chelsea on Saturday.
Ten Hag will have uses for Ronaldo, who made plain his desire to leave Manchester during the summer and has one league goal in 2022/23, across those games, and he knows the player well enough not to be too concerned by the head-shaking and muttering that followed his substitution against Newcastle.
He imagined Ronaldo would watch his replacement Marcus Rashford head wide and Fred miss tucking home a cross, believing that if he, CR7, had been on the end of either opportunity, he would have scored both times.
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Rashford had been suffering from illness ahead of the Newcastle game, while Antony Martial is recovering from a back problem. That helped push Ronaldo’s case to, unusually under Ten Hag, start a second game on the trot. A third start within a six-day period for the veteran would buck the season’s trend.
Conte says he’d rather see less of Ronaldo, 37, on this trip to Old Trafford, or at least a “more calm” version than in March. “He continues to make a difference,” said the Italian, paying tribute to Ronaldo for having “made the story of football in the last 15 years”.
And part of that story is a striking overall record against Spurs. They are one of his favourite punchbags. Against no English club has Ronaldo registered more of his 700 career goals. He has 14 against Tottenham in 20 matches, in only one of which – a 2017 Champions League group game for Real Madrid – did he finish on the losing side.
He’s the one member of the current United squad old enough to recall, from his previous spell, the era when the then United manager, Alex Ferguson, would prepare for playing Tottenham by dismissing them as fragile lightweights, with a now famous phrase: ‘Lads, it’s Spurs”.
Conte is entitled to smile about that. The Italian has not perfected Tottenham, but he has toughened them up.
