Football
Rob Train, Real Madrid blogger 6y

Ronaldo's 2018 proving reports of his demise were a bit premature

Cristiano Ronaldo could have been working to a script. Not a traditional Hollywood underdog tale of the unfancied slugger taking the big prize -- he already holds all of those. Rather, in his inimitable way, by reminding everybody since the turn of the year that it remains premature to write him off as a force operating at the very top of his profession.

There were no shortage of pencils being sharpened to draft the Portuguese's sporting obituary in December. Real Madrid had just slumped to a chastening Clasico defeat in the Bernabeu, leaving them 14 points behind Barcelona and Zinedine Zidane facing the first genuine crisis of his managerial career.

That 3-0 loss to Barca was a nadir. Zidane lent fuel to critics who have accused him of being tactically naïve by tasking Mateo Kovacic with shadowing Leo Messi, as he had done to good effect in the Spanish Super Cup. But the Frenchman had failed to take into account a change in the wind's direction. Barca's sails were full before the game while Real's title defence had already hit the rocks. Messi ran amok. Ronaldo put in one of his worst performances of the season and only Karim Benzema's shambolic display spared the Ballon d'Or holder a more thorough media barracking.

That those two players have now turned Zidane's winter of discontent into glorious pre-summer is testament not only to their cast-iron belief in their own abilities but to Zidane disproving the theory that he is a tactical novice. The Real coach has done away with his instinctive adherence to a 4-3-3 and shelved his experimental 4-1-3-2 -- the formation he deployed in the Clasico -- for a more straightforward approach.

With Marco Asensio and Lucas Vazquez gaining greater importance within the team, Real have been a different side in 2018. The defence remains as solid as a stick of butter on a radiator, but as Zidane pointed out before the game against Alaves in February: "We've always conceded goals and we'll continue to do so." It is as much a part of the club's modern-day fabric as the famous white shirt itself. The goal, to borrow a cliche, is to bang more in than the other side at the far end.

And that is where Ronaldo has come in, from stage left, and right on cue. Against Girona last Sunday he took his league tally in 2018 to 18 in 11 appearances. He also bagged three over 180 minutes against PSG to maintain his record of finding the net in every Champions League fixture this season.

The Girona game was particularly instructive, that script pressed into the Portuguese's hand before kick-off. Mohamed Salah, the man of the moment, had hit four and registered an assist a day earlier in the Premier League. Ronaldo exactly matched the Egyptian's performance.

But there is more to the 2018 version of Ronaldo than his positional shift to a more central role or a keener eye for goal than during the first half of the season: He is becoming far more of a team player.

Throughout his career, Ronaldo has faced not entirely unfounded accusations of individualism. In the last few weeks, he has handed the ball to Benzema to score from the spot when on a hat trick against Alaves, put a goal on a plate for Lucas Vazquez when he could have shot himself to bag a third against Girona and occasionally ceded free kick duties to Marco Asensio. All of which is hardly the light Ronaldo has traditionally been painted in.

While Ronaldo's goal-scoring intervention has been beneficial for Zidane, his all-around leadership and what the Frenchman described as his "positive energy" has also been timely after well-documented tiffs with Florentino Perez regarding his pay-packet and his president's eyelash-fluttering in the direction of Neymar.

Madrid are now inevitably being linked with a world-record move for Salah this summer. And while Ronaldo has never been accused of lacking motivation, the shadow of younger pretenders to his individual throne has perhaps concentrated his mind more sharply on the collective. As he has always stressed, without his teammates the Ballons d'Or would not arrive with such regularity.

The World Cup is the shop window Perez most enjoys pressing his nose against and the Real president is bound to make a splash this summer after being denied a new toy for too long. But it should not be on the problematic Neymar or Salah, whose blistering form is undeniable but perhaps also unsustainable.

Russia could provide a stage for the perfect final act to Ronaldo's 2017-18 renaissance. He and Salah went head-to-head on Friday night, the Liverpool forward opening the scoring in Zurich. In stoppage time, at 1-0 down, his Madrid counterpart netted twice in two minutes to hand Portugal victory in a game that encapsulated his season in a nutshell:

Never assume that Ronaldo is done until the curtain falls. The ever-watchful Perez need not seek fearful symmetry elsewhere just yet with the twinkle back in his star player's eye.

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