BEWARE OF THE GOAL SCORING MACHINE!!

Beware the goal machine... Ronaldo is back in Manchester to show why he's still top dog

Surely there was never really any doubt about it?

Cristiano Ronaldo’s absence during their weekend win at Rayo Vallecano had sparked fears he might miss the Champions League showdown with Manchester City.

But you knew Ronaldo would have to be really, really incapacitated to miss this mouth-watering semi-final return to his old stomping ground of Manchester.

His manager, Zinedine Zidane, delivered the reassuring news with a glint in his eye; Ronaldo is ‘100 per cent’ and primed for battle.

Ronaldo isn’t a man usually in need of additional motivation, but the former Manchester United star will be doubly determined to give their rivals City a good duffing up when he plays at the Etihad Stadium on Tuesday night.

A hero on the red side of Manchester, Ronaldo’s legend will only be enhanced if he denies City passage into a maiden Champions League final over the next eight days.

At 31, Ronaldo has been confronted by frequent and quite absurd notions that he is past it. A game without scoring raised eyebrows, a couple of barren matches is a disaster.

But how can it possibly be said that a man who has scored 47 goals this season - including 16 in the Champions League - is over the hill?

For the sake of context, his tally 16 goals in this season’s competition is double the number scored by closest challengers Robert Lewandowski and Thomas Muller of Bayern Munich, and Luis Suarez of Barcelona.

And, just for the record, Ronaldo has 12 more goals than Lionel Messi in Europe this season.

It equates to a quite phenomenal ratio of a goal every 56.2 minutes for the Portuguese star in the Champions League this season. The next best is Arsenal’s Olivier Giroud - whose five goals were spaced every 77.4 minutes.

Ronaldo loves a record as we well know and a goal at the Etihad would equal the 17 he scored in Real’s ultimately successful 2013-14 Champions League campaign.

He is also within striking distance of a century of goals in Europe’s elite competition. After a few years of being neck-and-neck with Messi in the all-time Champions League scoring list, Ronaldo has majestically pulled away.

The current reckoning is 93 goals for Ronaldo and 83 for his Argentine adversary. You imagine he’s going to smash the 100 mark, probably next season.

So City have been warned. Ronaldo is undoubtedly going to receive a frosty reception at the Etihad but he’s no stranger to playing the pantomime villain, indeed he often thrives on it.

And he’s caused City plenty of pain in the past, too, for both Real and Manchester United before that.

Back in September 2012, it was Ronaldo who scored a stoppage-time winner as Real beat City 3-2 in a pulsating group stage encounter.

It was a case of what might have been for Roberto Mancini’s team, who led 2-1 with less than three minutes remaining before Ronaldo made the difference as he so often does.