Real Madrid vs Sporting Lisbon: Cristiano Ronaldo starts new Champions League journey at his first club

Despite enjoying perhaps the finest few months of his career, Ronaldo's appetite for success will not be satisfied until there is no question that he is the best in the world

Ronaldo in training ahead of Wednesday's meeting with Sporting (Getty)

It will be 20 years next season, since a delegation of representatives from Sporting Lisbon, including the club’s then coach Leonel Pontes, travelled from Lisbon to Madeira to convince a 12-year-old boy called Ronaldo to join their club.

Tonight the memories will come flooding back as Sporting face Real Madrid in Ronaldo’s 132nd game in the Champions League. Top-scoring and winning the competition last season he showed he has lost none of the ability on the pitch. And a row with former Barcelona player Xavi showed he also still gets as annoyed ever by the suggestion he is anything other than the world’s number one.

It is rare to see him striding through the mixed zone at the Santiago Bernabeu where reporters wait for post-match reaction, but he made sure he appeared last Saturday and he knew exactly what he would be asked about.

Three days earlier Xavi had suggested that the only people who thought Ronaldo was a better player than Leo Messi were the sort of dyed-in-the-wool Real Madrid fans who watch him every week wearing their replica number seven shirts.

Thoughtfully stroking his chin as if he was carefully considering what to say, instead of having his argument long-since well-prepared, Ronaldo said: “Something came out on the Internet yesterday that the player who is most searched for online is me. I know that some players and coaches when they want to appear on the front pages they talk about ‘Cris’. It’s normal. What do I care what Xavi says? Xavi plays in Qatar. He has no relevance. He played. Xavi has won everything – World Cups and Euros, but he’s never won a Balon d’Or.”

The Messi-Ronaldo debate is a tiresome one, and the tone of Xavi’s ‘you’d have to be Madrid fan to think Ronaldo was better than Messi’, was light-hearted and harmless. But Ronaldo’s reaction was still fascinating.

Just as time has not affected his ability to score goals, nor slowed him down, nor softened the lines on the sculptured torso, neither does it appear to have shrunken the ego – he still hates the mere suggestion that he is not – as many of the statistics suggest – ahead of the rest.

Ronaldo, centre, during his early days at Sporting (Getty)

He is currently the Champions League all-time top scorer on 94 goals, and he has lifted the European Cup three times. Winning it this season would draw him level with Messi and leave him just one short of Alfredo di Stefano who won it five times. It would also mean he becomes part of the first team to retain it in its current format in consecutive seasons.

“It’s a big challenge,” he told Uefa this week. “We know it is not going to be easy but we are thinking positively: it can be done.”

The emphasis at Madrid this year is clearly La Liga. They have won it only once in the last eight years. But were Ronaldo to land the domestic title and win in the European Cup final in Cardiff next June then it would be his greatest season at Real Madrid to date. And to enjoy his best season aged 32 would be in keeping with that growing sense that when he finally quits one of the most incredible things about his career will have been the longevity.

Two decades since Sporting’s then-owner Aurelio Pereira waved a 22,000 euros debt Nacional owed to Sporting in order to bring him to the club; there are no signs that the light is dimming.

When he was 12-years-old he had the same attitude that he has now... I can still remember him beating me at table-tennis and then telling me where I was going wrong.

&#13; <p>Leonel Pontes, Ronaldo's first coach at Sporting</p>&#13;

He will be offered a new five-year contract at the start of October that would have him still in a Real Madrid shirt aged 36. His agent Jorge Mendes has already tipped him to still be scoring 30-plus goals a season when he is 40. And he is well aware of how last season proved that there really are no signs of decline. “In terms of trophies it was the best ever both for team and individual awards,” he says. “I was top scorer in the Champions League and a European champion for both club and country.”

Such is the quality of Zinedine Zidane’s squad that both Isco and Marcos Asensio are left out of the squad for tonight’s game. Asked if Ronaldo would play the whole match after his first 65 minutes of the season at the weekend he seemed to shrug at the impossibility of keeping him off the pitch. “If you ask him he will want to play the 90 minutes,” he said.

“When he was 12-years-old he had the same attitude that he has now,” his first coach at Sporting, Pontes told Marca this week. “I can still remember him beating me at table-tennis and then telling me where I was going wrong.”

Former Sporting owner Pereira adds: “He always did train with the same intensity that he played. That has not changed. I’m sure if he scores again us then he will not celebrate out of respect to his old club.”

Not content with just having him not celebrate scoring, Sporting’s current chairman Bruno de Carvalho said this week: ‘My objective is to make sure Ronaldo comes back and plays out his career with us.” Both demands might be asking too much although Ronaldo has avoided the celebration when scoring for Manchester United against Sporting in the past.

Tonight he begins another onslaught on his favourite competition. He needs to keep scoring to stay clear of Messi who is only 11 goals behind him. And he needs to keep playing. He only needs another 26 games and he’ll be on a par with Xavi who with 151 appearances has the record for an out-field player. After last week’s comments that’s another milestone that he would love to pass.