Juventus had it all to do in their Champions League last-16 second leg against Atletico Madrid. They needn’t have worried, they had the best player in the history of the competition on their side
A feverish atmosphere took hold of Juventus stadium as the Bianconeri hosted the best defensive team in Europe, down two goals on aggregate. Cristiano Ronaldo, you might remember him – the bronzed Adonis created in a laboratory to score goals and flaunt his abs and score some more goals and flaunt his additional, supplementary abs – slammed a penalty and two towering headers home for the Turin side when they needed his eyeball-popping, megastar aura to take hold the most.
It was a quintessential Ronaldo performance, one that encapsulates why he continues to stay afloat at the very peak of the summit of the game, even as Lionel Messi persists in making the world swoon and Kylian Mbappe threatens to throw his tired, ageing body down the mountain.
Ronaldo has long been positionless but this was the culmination of all that learned intelligence over the years as he switched from the left to the right to centre forward and back again, depending on when and where he was sensing weakness, an impatient hair-gelled shark smelling the blood in the water.
His first came from a whipped cross from the superb Federico Bernadeschi to the far post. Ronaldo, almost an art installation piece of hypertension and muscle at this point, didn’t need a second invitation to win the header by liquidating and then consuming the hapless Juanfran, out of position at left back, like a protein shake.
His second was another video game double-jump header, again at the far post, this time from the opposite flank to the other back stick. The predatory instincts that many had claimed were waning (he had scored just one goal in the Champions League before tonight) don’t seem to have waned at all.
The third, to make it 3-0 against Diego Simeone’s organised Alamo reenactors, a team that had kept five consecutive clean sheets in all competitions, was a penalty set up from a marauding Bernadeschi run infield. It resulted in a clumsy clip of the heels by Angel Correa in the Atletico box, a challenge typical of a forward trying to dig in and defend, the outcome never in doubt. This is Cristiano Ronaldo, after all. Even if he is 34 years old now and largely forgotten about.
This is Cristiano Ronaldo who, whilst not quite the player he once was, is still capable of bending a game to his will and the cooling liquid metal of a deficit into a big fat W.
This is still his competition until it is snatched away from him.
