5 Reasons why Cristiano Ronaldo is being written off too early

#3 Set Piece Ability was never the centerpiece of his game

Cristiano Ronaldo's freekicks haven't been the best lately

There is no doubt that Cristiano Ronaldo managed to score some outrageous and headline-grabbing set-piece goals.

Many critics point out that Ronaldo is no longer a set-piece expert. It is indeed true but the fact is that Ronaldo's free kicks have never been his key to making an impact.

He has a career conversion rate of 6.07% and while most fanatical fans would still argue that he is the best on free kicks- a realist knows that having Ronaldo on free-kicks is an indulgence of sorts for the Portugese, a trust in his abilities to make magic.

He retains the capacity to score from range but Ronaldo no longer does so with regularity. But this does not put any doubts on his overall capacity in any way. Last season Ronaldo had scored 4 freekicks with a conversion rate of close to 10% meaning that he was, in fact, better than his career average.

Another key factor about free-kicks is confidence. Most set-piece specialists always score in sets- that is in short a peak period where five out ten goes in and then a drought for a while unless of course- set-pieces are the center of their entire game- players like Sigurdsson

So his failure in finding the net from free-kicks is not exactly a worrying trend because Ronaldo was ripping teams apart without scoring many from free-kicks in the last few years especially after a tendonitis issue came to light.

With Bale and Isco sharing duty on free-kicks, the number of his attempts have reduced as well over the last few seasons furthering hampering his tally.