Cristiano Ronaldo: Real Madrid are a shadow of their best without their star striker

The club's star player missed the goalless draw with Manchester City at the Etihad

(2016 Getty Images)

Cristiano Ronaldo tried to get over the pain of being deemed unfit to play by settling down in the dug-out to watch videos of himself.

If the brooding, self-consciously doleful look of his seemed a little staged, then don’t be fooled. When Rafael Benitez managed Ronaldo at the Bernabeu he found that it was the Champions League that did it for him. The sudden strains that would limit his interest in the hum-drum schedule of La Liga melted away. Benitez will tell you that this was the stage on which he would feel he was pitting himself against Lionel Messi for what trinkets comes at the end of the season.

It might have paid some of his teammates to watch those videos too, if only to remind them what the X-factor looks and feels like, because this side were certainly a shadow of their best without him. “We’ll use our weapons,” Zinadene Zidane had said on Monday night but they were blunt; the team incapable of that burst of pace and flash of enterprise – the beautiful unexpected – which puts the fear of God into Ronaldo’s opponents.

The mystery of Zidane’s strategy was that he did not hand Gareth Bale the central striking role Ronaldo had vacated - the one that the Welshman always implored Benitez to give him, because the Ronaldo clique would leave him isolated out on the flank. The centre forward’s job went to Zidane’s compatriot Karim Benzema instead and what we saw was something proletarian.

The Frenchman dropped to collect the ball rather than intuiting the razor passes Luka Modric and Toni Kroos are so patently capable of using to get a forward around the back. Or seizing possession and driving through alone. Benzema did not re-appear after the interval and the 23-year-old Spaniard Jese Rodriguez Ruiz offered nothing better in his place until he leapt to Lucas Vazquez’s cross with 20 minutes to run and sent it onto the bar.

That was a missed opportunity because Modric did not need long to reveal his understated presence as one of the brightest jewels, providing the midfield architecture with his turns and rapid passes through the eye of a needle. His 15-yard despatch with the right outstep for Marcelo, on the overlap, seven minutes into the second half was his signature.

The game changer wore blue, not white, and in the presence of Kevin de Bruyne we saw again the catastrophic folly of Jose Mourinho’s decision that he was dispensable at Chelsea. The anxiety he provoked was transparent on Pepe’s impetuous challenge which took him out flying and earned him a card.

There was just about enough equilibrium in the Spanish defensive to deter the Belgian, though – Casemiro timing a challenge well, for example, after De Bruyne left Pepe behind – but this did not look like rear-guard of champion class. Casemiro struggled for rhythm and though Sergio Ramos has had a season to forget, it took his stature and presence to anchor things. What a signing for Manchester United he would have been had money – 10m euros - not talked last summer.

(2016 Getty Images) (2016 Getty Images)

Where Zidane fitted into this matrix was difficult to know. He was a picture of motionless elegance on the edge of his technical area for almost the entire game, the hand gestures so understated as to make not the slight impact on his players. It was as if he was playing the game inside his own head. He did not have the faculty to change the flow of the game, either.

It was a manifestation of what some felt would be the problem when Zidane replaced Benitez last January. ‘ZZ’ provides the showbiz and the status but has been tested only with his club’s second string, and with a vastly greater budget that the opposition at that.

The problem which City may come to look back on as a calamity was their struggle to break through this anaemic opposition. The loss of David Silva to a hamstring injury with the game not 40 minutes old deprived them of their own architect, though it still seemed to be one of those nights when the side could not get players close enough to Sergio Aguero to find a pass for him. That can happen with regularity and it is a stunning failure considering what he delivers when the supply line is there. Four shots on target all night is not a statistic which does not win European Cups.

(2016 Getty Images (2016 Getty Images)

And so it came to pass that a Madrid side shipping the ball around sideways and deeply lacking in passes to break the tactical lines actually managed to finish the game so much in the ascendancy that City left the field with a sense of relief. Bale, taking the game into his own hands, flickered late on and Hart twice saved sharply – extending a leg to block Casemiro’s header, then placing himself in front of a point blank effort Pepe should have done better with.

Not the Manchester semi-final which City had imagined, then, through these years of trying to come to grips with how to prosper in Europe - though it is a scoreline which makes next week’s equation as simple as it can be. It may all be down to whether Ronaldo’s hamstring is repaired. “I’d have played if it were the final,” he said before withdrawing and his team have done enough without him to make that a genuine prospect.