Adebayor has the game to take on his PlayStation hero

They are neck-and-neck on 19 Premier League goals for this season but if Emmanuel Adebayor wants to beat Cristiano Ronaldo to the golden boot he will have to score more than the man he says is like a "PlayStation footballer".

In the world of the modern Premier League, video game-obsessed, footballer that is probably just about the greatest compliment one goalscorer can pay to another. On Monday night Adebayor scored his 19th goal of the season as Arsenal moved five points clear of Manchester United at the top of the table. Less than 24 hours earlier, Ronaldo had come up short in his side's 2-1 defeat by Manchester City.

The race for the Premier League title has also become the race between Ronaldo and Adebayor for supremacy among the league's goalscorers, even if the Portuguese has scored most of his from midfield. "I love to watch him [Ronaldo]," Adebayor said. "He is a good player with lots of quality. Watching him play is something else – it is like watching a player on PlayStation. I have a lot of respect for what he has done. As a midfielder, he has scored a lot of goals. He is a good player."

If you were splitting hairs then Ronaldo is fractionally ahead in the race to be the league's most efficient goalscorer: his 19 goals have come at an average of one every 98 minutes spent on the pitch. Adebayor scores at the rate of one every 107 minutes on the pitch. The clubs are due to face one another at Old Trafford in the FA Cup fifth round on Saturday.

"The title is not finished as teams can always come from behind," Adebayor said. "We just want to keep our focus at the moment. We cannot talk about the title until the end of the season. We are like a family, the team is very young, so the belief in the dressing-room is big. It is going to be very tough. We have a lot of big games coming."

The big games are the trips to Chelsea and United and the visits to the Emirates of Everton and Liverpool. United have Liverpool, Arsenal and Aston Villa at home but still await one trip to Chelsea on 26 April.

Meanwhile, Adebayor said that he kept in contact with his old team-mate Thierry Henry who led Arsenal's last title-winning season with 30 league goals. "He [Henry] is like my brother," Adebayor said. "He has just sent me another message right now to congratulate me. He talks to me a lot. During the summer we spoke a lot. He told me he believed in me, he believed in my qualities. I want to thank him a lot as he helped me out. He sends me messages saying, 'I know you have a lot of qualities, you have scored 15 or 16, but you can score more if you put more concentration in in the games'."

At the moment their fates could hardly be more contrasting. Henry pulled out of Barcelona's draw with Sevilla on Saturday with a hip problem and has just six goals in the league this season. Should he score in Arsenal's next two games, Adebayor will equal a club record that Henry never managed: Ian Wright's feat of scoring in 11 consecutive games.