After failing to score in the opening 10 minutes against Chelsea, Cristiano Ronaldo set an undesirable personal record for himself as a striker, albeit one of the world's greatest.
Including stoppage time, Ronaldo had gone 537 minutes without scoring, the longest drought of his club career since leaving Manchester United in 2009 for Real Madrid in a then-world record transfer of £80 million as one of the game's elite forwards and holder of the Ballon d'Or. He had not scored in his previous five games against Brighton, either.
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In the 546 minutes between May and September of 2010, when he first arrived at the Bernabeu, the Portugal captain went without a club goal. But Ronaldo topped that amount after Brighton held him back until the 51st minute on Tuesday. Daniel Sturridge's thumping header in stoppage time gave Manchester United their first win of the season as well as ending the 37-year-goal old's drought of 587 minutes, which had lasted more than 1112 years.
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Ronaldo's first goal of the year came on his seventh appearance of 2022, which is the longest he has gone without a goal at the beginning of a calendar year since 2003, when he was a youngster and played 23 games for Sporting CP and eight games for Manchester United before scoring. He went five games without scoring for each of the next three calendar years, but never has he started the year so poorly since his transformation from an unreliable winger to the most prolific forward in the history of men's internationals and the Champions League, where he is the all-time leading scorer in both competitions.
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