James Lawton: Ronaldo's complexity rescued by moment of beautiful simplicity

Thursday, 8 March 2007

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It was a night for authority, a brusque Manchester United statement of contempt for what had happened in northern France two weeks before - and some mighty assertion of their right to a return to a pivotal stage of the Champions League after last season's humiliating denouement against this less than daunting Lille.

Unfortunately United are not doing authority with any great spontaneity at the moment, and nor did it help that their most consistent player, Paul Scholes, was operating under the shadow of a disastrously timed three-game suspension.

Worst of all, though, for much of the night, was the parody of a serious performance from the virtuoso who is supposed to be just about single-handedly returning United to the stars. Cristiano Ronaldo has been described as the surging favourite for player of the year. He is said to be on his way to defining football stardom in the 21st century. Last night, when he wasn't producing the odd flash of thoroughbred class, he was defining almost everything that is currently going wrong with the Premiership league leaders. Everything, that is, except rescuing results which maintain the promise of sensational reinstatement at the top of English football.

If Ronaldo had been any more exasperating, or profligate, even his proud and indulgent mentor Sir Alex Ferguson might have been inclined to withdraw him from the action, if only for the good of his character. However, that he didn't, as probably is always likely to be the case when such extraordinary natural ability is part of the equation, is the key to United's latest redemption from quite dismal performance.

The boy wonder had exhausted his supply of step-overs and other random fripperies when he settled on a moment of sweet, even beautiful football simplicity in the 71st minute. It was his dazzling justification for a night that promised to be a monument to wasted ability and shocking football ego. There would be more of that after he made the night - and United's place in the quarter-finals - safe but by then he was a hero again.

Gone was the fleeting shame of another outrageous dive, this time rewarded with a yellow card by the Spanish referee, Luis Cantalejo... gone, too, the sense that he was involved in an adventure of self-advertisement all of his own.

Ronaldo was eventually called off the field but then, unlike his partner in the long walk, Wayne Rooney, he was again a hero on the rise. His perfectly controlled run along the left, after picking the ball up 10 yards into the Lille half, ended with a sumptuous cross into the path of Henrik Larsson. That was enough to break the will of a Lille team who had showed some moments of aggression but had never put United under the kind of pressure that a team is entitled to encounter at this point in the greatest club tournament in football.

United had been best served by the veteran craft of Scholes but there had been a worrying inability to inflict themselves on seriously mediocre opposition.

It is the pattern of United's last few games, when victories have been rescued in Lille in the first leg, at Fulham and Liverpool, and all the dazzling prizes have been kept on the horizon.

But this kind of hand-to-mouth existence can carry a team only so far and with Scholes facing suspension, Larsson preparing to head home to Sweden and Louis Saha injured, this was not the kind of triumph Ferguson had in mind when he handed one of his more severe reproaches to Lille for their anarchic behaviour in the first leg after Ryan Giggs' opportunistic free-kick.

The United manager decided to keep Giggs in cotton wool last night, a shrewd move perhaps with so much challenge rising up down the road.

Less logical seemed to be the decision to play the out-of-form Rooney out wide. His body language has scarcely been rapturous these past few weeks, and last night there were times when it was positively funereal. Several times he stumbled to the floor and shook his head. There was a scarcely a flicker of the best of his talent and this was still another reason for a subdued reaction to United's latest move towards a return to the peak of Europe.

Maybe United are merely taking a pause. Maybe they are gathering themselves for the last big push towards the climax of a great season of redemption. It is certainly a pretty thought, as pretty as one of Cristiano Ronaldo's most extravagantly successful moves. However, for United this is no time for ornamentation but the kind of gut effort which separates the winners from the losers. This is the trial that they have to face with rather more conviction than was mustered here.