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Since the clock chimed 12 and 2018 began, Cristiano Ronaldo has been a characteristically outstanding player in both, the UEFA Champions League and La Liga.
Despite it only being March, Ronaldo has been directly involved in 25 goals, scoring 21 and assisting 4, achieving all of this in just 13 games!
It's a truly astonishing turn around considering his bad stretch of form domestically during the first half of the season, with many wondering whether Ronaldo was experiencing his inevitable decline.
The footballing legend apparently didn't get the memo and at the age of 33, he is still redefining the limits of longevity in football, proving once again why he is one of, if not the greatest player of all time.
A poor start to the season? No problem
This is the best start to a calendar year for Ronaldo in terms of goals scored and because of this, he has undoubtedly put his poor start to the season into the shadows.
In the process of scoring at a ludicrous rate of almost 2 goals per game, the forward is now the top goalscorer in Europe despite being way off the mark at the beginning of the year.
Although Ronaldo hasn't let up on his goal-scoring prowess in the UEFA Champions League during the 2017/18 campaign, he has endured one of his worst starts to La Liga going into 2018 boasting only 4 goals to his name and to make things worse, his Barcelona rival Lionel Messi was way ahead of him with 15 goals.
Nevertheless, with the Real Madrid star undeterred by the mountain he had to climb in order to return to the pinnacle of Spanish football after his short leave of absence, he has now scored 22 goals - just 3 goals behind Messi who sits at 25, and when one looks at the number of games it has taken each player to reach their respective goal tallies, one can see that although Ronaldo is 3 goals shy of Lionel Messi, he currently possesses a better goal-to-game ratio of 0.96, compared to Messi's goal-to-game ratio of 0.89.
Still plenty to play for
Despite Real Madrid being well and truly out of the title race in La Liga, Ronaldo's return to his unparalleled goal-scoring ways is only a positive thing as the UEFA Champions League - a trophy which perhaps means the most to Los Blancos - is still up for grabs, and with Ronaldo brimming with confidence in front of goal again, it will surely lift the spirits of the whole team and strike fear into the hearts of all the other quarterfinalists left in the tournament.
Especially Juventus,who will face Real Madrid in a fortnight in a game that will serve as a rematch of last year's final, which saw Real Madrid successfully defend their UEFA Champions League title by defeating Juventus emphatically, with Ronaldo scoring two goals past Gianluigi Buffon in the process, denying the Italian legend a chance to finally lift the much-coveted UEFA Champions League trophy.
