Ronaldo’s delivered on all levels ...now Ole must do the same

Our Anfield legend always hits the mark

PULL up a chair, I’m going to tell you a little story about Cristiano Ronaldo.

My lad Jacob is a huge football fan, obviously, and he used to have pictures of all the great players on his wall. Naturally, Ronaldo was one of them.

When Liverpool played Real Madrid, I took him to the game and we found ourselves by their team bus – standing there with a bunch of other fans.

Cristiano came over, made a fuss of him, then he put his arm around Jacob and took him onto the bus to meet all the other players, get autographs, that sort of thing.

It made my gob-smacked son’s day... year even!

Now, I’m not saying he does that for every young kid out there, and of course he’d have remembered me from his first days in English football when he was an ambitious youngster and I was firing on all cylinders.

Maybe my picture was on his wall... though I somehow doubt it. But the point is he went out of his way with a kindness and generosity of spirit that said so much about him.

And for me, that makes him stand out.

He’s been at the top of the world game for 16, 17 years now, and he can still find time to make a fuss of the son of someone he played against 15 years ago.

I take people on how they treat me and, so naturally, I’m going to defend Cristiano.

Some of the noise around his role in the Manchester United team has been ridiculous and baffling.

Look. He’s not the player he was. He hasn’t been for a few years now.

But what we’re saying here is he’s not quite at the level of being one of the greatest players of all time.

We’re saying he’s not quite performing as one of the five best players in football history.

But he’s still producing. Not just for United, but for Portugal – and look at the number of hugely important goals he’s still scoring for them in the final minutes of games.

That’s the mark of someone who is still massively influential. There’s this rattle about the shape of the United team being thrown out by his presence.

Criticism that he doesn’t fit it, needs others to do the work for him. Yada, yada, yada.

He was brought in to score goals and he’s done that.

Clearly, United thought it was a need they had, despite having Edinson Cavani on the books – and I suspect they tried to offload the Uruguayan in the summer but couldn’t find anyone to take his wages.

I get that Cristiano probably wasn’t Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s first choice, I get that maybe United’s primary motivation was to prevent him from going to Manchester City.

Wise move, because if he’d gone there, they’d have run away with the title again, I have absolutely no doubt about that.

Why? Because he scores goals.

He guarantees more than Cavani, yet no one criticised Cavani last season when he was asked to do the same role.

I’d argue too, that this criticism he’s failing to gel with the team is misguided.

Ronaldo has delivered, and now it’s up to the rest of the team to deliver too. That’s the manager’s job, and maybe Ole hasn’t delivered in that regard yet. United have got results this season but, really, the football has been far from convincing, and they have only beaten teams who were struggling at the time. Is that Ronaldo’s fault? No. It’s the manager’s job to sort that out. We’ve said for some years now, United needed three players to

challenge the others for the title. Now they’ve got them. So Ole deserves a bit of time to settle in Cristiano, Jadon Sancho and Raphael Varane – and produce a compelling team.

Give him this year, let’s see how he makes the most of their talents.

I’ve heard people saying Ronaldo is a luxury player United can’t afford. But in my experience managers like luxury players because they deliver – that’s why they’re a luxury and not a water carrier.

Cristiano has delivered, now Ole must do the same because he’s been given the players and there are no excuses.

If Cristiano had gone to City, they would have run away with the he title... because scores goals