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But I have to say the discussions in the Blue Bell on Saturday were not about the things to come. I happened to say I thought Cristiano Ronaldo was now the best player to ever play in the Premier League. Well that put a fire under even the mildest man's backside.

But who's been better? Shearer? Zola? Henry? Bergkamp? All right they've all been great in their own way, but has anyone taken a season by storm in quite the way the Portuguese lad has?

Now, I know the arguments against...

1. He's not been around for very long.
Well, he's been around long enough for teams to have worked out a way of playing him. But unless your squad's got a whippet who's strong in the tackle, you can forget it.

2. He dives.
Well yes, he does. It's embarrassing, too, cos he's a strapping lad and he shouldn't need to. The pitiful, cow-eyed gestures at the refs don't help either (not that there's a professional player worth his salt who won't be falling over every time they set foot in the opposition's area if Rob Styles is the ref).

Even so, put the ball at this lad's feet, watch him go and you can forgive some of the other stuff.

3. He's a poser.
True again. Sometimes the lad seems to have half of Boots in his hair - he looks like a drag artist without the wig on. The ear-rings, the double-shuffles, the chest-out strutting...I dunno.

I'd like to hold it against him too, but frankly if I could run at 200 mph with a ball on a piece of a string I might walk around like I was God almighty 'n' all.

4. That wink.
He got Rooney sent off in the World Cup, people say. Well, hardly. He didn't trample Carvalho's crotch and then push himself over. Yeah, it wasn't his greatest moment but footballers have prayed on the stupidities of other footballers for years. The same people might argue that Materazzi got Zidane sent off 'cos of what he said. Crap.

My point about Cristiano is he has a bit of all the other players mentioned. He terrifies like Henry with his pace, he has the nous of Bergkamp when he needs it - and he's better in the air than either of them.

His goal tally's up there with big Al, and he has invented an entirely new free-kick that defies belief.

He turns the ball into one of them crappy plaggy jobs that you used as a kid when the casey had got a puncture. It swerves and dips and curves and flips. It'd bamboozle Stephen Hawking let alone Jussi Jaaskeleinen.

Then there's the flicks and the wiggles and the shimmies. If Pan's People had taken up footie it would've looked a bit like Ronaldo.

Of course these are the sort of things that English schoolboys have shaken out of them the moment they step out on to the local quagmire.

'Save that for the samba classes, you Jessie! You can have some time with the ball when you've run round the pitch 10 times! And even then I don't want you hanging on to it for too long. Get it oop the pitch!' (Ooh dear, am I betraying Gary Megson's coaching secrets here?)

The result of this Neanderthal approach is a national team that tends to treat the football like a hand grenade with the pin out.

Me, I could watch Ronaldo play every day. The backheel was just further evidence of the lad's genius. (Why is it called a backheel any road? Surely you can't heel it forwards?)

To me, he's taken what's possible on a football pitch to a higher level.

If he can stay vertical and cut out the bleating when someone has the audacity to get the ball off him – and if he can put up with my missus drooling like a Labrador over a T-bone steak - then I can safely say he's had no peers in the English game for the last 15 years.

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'Save that for the samba classes, you Jessie! You can have some time with the ball when you've run round the pitch 10 times! And even then I don't want you hanging on to it for too long. Get it oop the pitch!' (Ooh dear, am I betraying Gary Megson's coaching secrets here?)

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