Manchester United fans are waiting for Cristiano Ronaldo’s first game

Manchester United fans are waiting for Cristiano Ronaldo’s first game. Today is a big day at old Trafford , if you know how much love people have for Ronaldo you will understand what it means to them to see him again playing for their team.

“The only thing I can compare it to was when Eric Cantona came back from his ban,”

says lifelong fan Andy Kilduff, co-founder of the Stretford End Flags group.

“We played Liverpool at home and there was all this ‘does he start, is he coming off the bench, he has not played for months’ – he almost came out of the tunnel completely on his own and Old Trafford erupted.

“How Ronaldo comes out of that tunnel against Newcastle will be pretty special. The love has always been there for him.

“When we played Real Madrid in 2013, even though he was wearing number seven and [stadium announcer] Alan Keegan was reading the teams out in number order, he left Ronaldo as the last player and said ‘welcome back to Old Trafford’. That shows how special he is.”

“We didn’t know an awful lot about him,” said Nicky Hunt, who was preparing to make his Premier League debut for Bolton. He was 19.

“Alex Ferguson obviously thought ‘I am not happy with this, I am going to have to bring on the best player in the world’,” Hunt said.

“I had played a lot of reserves football against wingers and strikers. At that time, wingers were usually just head down, kick it, cross it. When he came on, my main focus was to smash him. I did it twice, the first two times he got the ball.

“He got annoyed, thought ‘who’s this?’ and started turning it on. It was so hard. I was watching his feet, when I should have been watching the ball. It was mind-boggling at times.

“He had these stepovers, skills and tricks. Thierry Henry and Ryan Giggs did it but not that quick, not that fast and not as many times. It was continuous. He could use both feet and go past you both ways. It was hard watching him, the ball and his feet and your own legs because if they get crossed, you are falling over.

“I played against him five or six times overall and had a few torrid afternoons chasing after his number seven shirt.”

“Some people say now that the Ronaldo debut was the best they had ever seen of a United player,” said Kilduff. “What about Wayne Rooney? He scored a hat-trick in the Champions League. People almost forget about that.

“That Bolton game was more about the crowd. The game was not that good and they wanted to be entertained. They bought into the stepovers. He added excitement and there was clearly something about him.

“He was good against Bolton but his career at United did take a while to get going. He beat people but nothing came of it. He would roll around 20 times when he had been kicked and moan at the referee. A few games after the Bolton game, we played Charlton and their fans were singing ‘you bought the wrong Ronaldo’.”

“One of the reasons there was so much hype around him coming back was that he was being linked with [Manchester] City and it was a case of not bearing to see him in a rival shirt,” said Kilduff. “Now we have got him.

“When he first came, we didn’t know what we were going to get but it is a bit like that now.

“He is not the Ronaldo who goes running up the wing and doing the stepover. He is more the centre-forward who takes the free-kicks. He still has the leap in the air. He has that something extra, which we didn’t have before. He can do something magical. It puts the fear factor into the opposition.”

“He will get an amazing reception,” said Kilduff. “But the incentive for Newcastle is massive isn’t it?

“The last thing you want is all this euphoria to be followed by a draw or a defeat.”