Cristiano Ronaldo gives Narcissism a good name. He is self-love fully justified. Not to the manor born, the world’s No 1 footballer has been driven by an especially potent kind of pride to turn every stadium he plays in into an outpost of his empire.
Across Merseyside in the coming hours there will be that guilty brand of pleasure that is felt when a great player is coming to town. Yes, Kop loyalists will flex larynxes to roar on Raheem Sterling and Steven Gerrard.
But you can bet your house that most are also thrilled at the prospect of Ronaldo trotting on to the Anfield grass in his pristine white uniform. The veneration of inspirational talents in No 7 shirts runs from Kenny Dalglish all the way through to dangerous foreign opponents: even ones who played for Manchester United.
If you could script a Liverpool fan’s worst modern nightmare – on the pitch at least – it would be an ex-Old Trafford icon with 19 goals in his last 13 Champions League fixtures gunning for Brendan Rodgers’s side in the immediate post-Luis Suárez era.
An ex-Old Trafford icon who needs two more goals to match Raul’s all-time record of 71 in the world’s premier club competition, and who could yet make it to 100 if he can maintain this kind of form for three or four more years.
A prodigy from his mid-teenage years, Ronaldo has achieved the feat of becoming more and more formidable with each passing summer, unlike his old United team-mate, Wayne Rooney, whose precocity is now starting to count against him.
The current Ballon d’Or holder, though, has been a steam train surging faster and tooting louder with each campaign, to the point where Lionel Messi, two years younger, has some work to do to regain his old status as nonpareil.
Liverpool fans will loathe his United connection and feel protective towards the four defenders who are asked to stop his knifing runs and lethal finishes. They will feel also a sense of where the top now is in world football: artistically, athletically and certainly financially.
With each transfer window the suspicion grows that five or six clubs in Europe will automatically scoop up the 20 or so truly elite players. The network of super-agents and billionaire owners or institutions now exists to make that migration pretty much inevitable.
Thus Sterling’s rise as a Liverpool player of aristocratic promise leads automatically to speculation linking him to Real Madrid, as if some law of the universe is dragging him to Spain. This could not be more annoying.
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Infographic: Ronaldo's incredible scoring record at Real & United ...
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Liverpool’s fans have already seen one superstar obey the new law of magnetic attraction (Luis Suárez to Barcelona) and their spirits would not bear the same outcome with a second player they acquired through expert scouting (albeit in wholly different circumstances.)
So Ronaldo represents everything Liverpool wish to be again – masters of Europe – and all the dark forces working to create a super-elite of which they are currently not part. Over-thinking it can be avoided by the simple act of enjoying a contest against surely the best opposition player to set foot on the Anfield turf in the Champions League era.
The good news is that in five games for United in front of the Kop, Ronaldo failed to locate the net. He scored twice in nine north-west derbies from 2003-2009 but was seldom the standout figure. In his later years at United, he made the glorious leap from decorative player to domineering one. Physically and mentally, he has developed into a footballer who can hurt the opposition not only when a chance arises but when he chooses to.
This special power is seen once or twice in a generation. Messi has it, too, which is why Raul’s record of 71 ‘European Cup’ goals is doomed.
Barcelona’s house sorcerer is level with Ronaldo on 69. The race is on not only to pass Raul but to be the first to a century.
Ronaldo back in England is always an occasion for nostalgia and excitement. He scored the only goal in a 1-0 win against Spurs at White Hart Lane in 2011 and struck the winner in Real’s 2-1 win against United in the 2012-13 round of 16. Barely a day passes without hope flaring at United that he will somehow be repatriated and turn the key in the lock of another Cheshire mansion.
With his 30 million Twitter followers and 100 million Facebook ‘fans’, Ronaldo is a global commodity, despite his slight awkwardness in public situations.
Movie star sheen is less high on his list of sellable virtues than the sense that here is a footballer who took a conscious decision to be the master of his own talent – and to make the most of it every single day until it deserts him.
Harry Redknapp row with Adel Taarabt diverts attention from QPR's real task
Queens Park Rangers finally came out of the starting stalls on Sunday but you would never know it from the unholy row over Adel Taarabt and his girth, which has prompted the chairman Tony Fernandes to wag his finger at both sides in the dispute.
Sure, QPR lost 3-2 at home against Liverpool in a flurry of late goals, but in the first half they were superb. Wooden, slow and porous to that point in the campaign, they finally decided to play with freedom and verve. The effect was impressive, even if the win was thrown away through naive defending – the phrase of the day, as chosen by QPR’s own players.
In the press conferences afterwards we expected to find Harry Redknapp, the QPR manager, anguished but encouraged. Instead he embarked on a stream of consciousness about Taarabt being “three stone overweight” and loping about the training ground. Taarabt hit back by lifting his shirt to show his six-pack and Redknapp responded by claiming tonsillitis had caused the player’s sudden weight loss.
What the hell? Redknapp, in these situations, often strives for comic effect. Emotion carries his stories over the hill and far away. In this instance he only diverted attention from a promising performance that suggested QPR could yet stay up. It could have been the start of something good, not of a glorified pub ding-dong.
Oscar Pistorius story nothing to do with sport or Paralympians
Oscar Pistorius was “an inspiration” to the world of sport, right? No more than any other disabled athlete. It was just that the “Bladerunner” tale of one man fighting his way from Paralympic into Olympic sport appealed to our need for an easily digestible narrative of defiance.
The fact that we needed a stand-out Paralympic hero who would feature above all others points to our generally superficial attitude to disability.
It turns out he was damaged and dangerous and not what he pretended to be. You can only hope Paralympians will see this as a story that has nothing to do with sport or them. We do not need fairy tales to appreciate the Paralympics.
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