The last time Cristiano Ronaldo played at Old Trafford, Manchester United abandoned tradition.
In every home game, certainly in the last decade, United and opposition players have walked out of the tunnel in the corner of the Stretford End to the sound of music, usually This Is The One by The Stone Roses. The handshake formalities follow, as does the Champions League theme on those European nights. Then, stadium announcer Alan Keegan reads out the line-ups, always starting with the visitors .
Not so in March 2013. As the first 22 began to get into position, United s team was read out first, in the usual numerical order. Real Madrid s followed, starting from goalkeeper Diego Lopez and number two, Raphael Varane, until it jumped from six, Sami Khedira straight to 10, Mesut Ozil .
The players and officials were impatiently dithering around the centre-circle by the time the missing name was announced to the crowd. Number seven, Cristiano Ronaldo, was met with thunderous cheers.
Cristiano Ronaldo s record goals in Europe s top-five leagues:
Italy: 5
Spain: 311
England: 84
— UEFA Champions League (@ChampionsLeague)
He raised his hands to the four corners of the ground he graced for six years, where his name was held in the highest esteem even after he got the move to Madrid he spent the best part of 12 months agitating for. He made a very similar gesture 69 minutes later after scoring the winning goal that would send United out of the Champions League in Alex Ferguson s last season in charge. It was a fairly unremarkable tap-in by Ronaldo s standards; indeed, the game is mostly remembered by United fans for the contentious Nani red card and the admission from then-Madrid coach Jose Mourinho that the best team lost. But the refusal to celebrate, that peculiar yardstick by which so many supporters measure the decency of their former players, was not forgotten.
On Tuesday, five and a half years later, Ronaldo will be back again. Now 33, with five Ballons d Or and Champions League trophies to his name, he will be wearing the number seven shirt of Juventus, for whom he has scored five goals in 10 appearances. The latest, another tap-in against Genoa on Saturday, made him the first player to reach 400 goals in Europe s top-five leagues. Neither his astonishing powers on the pitch nor his remarkable drive to be the best have waned to any real degree. Every game teaches something, he wrote on Instagram after Juve allowed Genoa an equaliser and failed to win for the first time since they signed him.
