While Wayne Rooney’s ineffectiveness continues to baffle the press, the heroics of Manchester United’s Cristiano Ronaldo continue to be equally surprising. You’d think that following the criticism Ronaldo received for his part in Rooney’s sending off at the World Cup, it would be the Portuguese who would feel out of sorts playing again in England; instead, it’s been Rooney who looks like a fish out of water. But that hardly matters when Cristiano Ronaldo is in the kind of form he showed against Newcastle Sunday at Old Trafford. The Portugal winger gave Stephen Carr an absolute nightmare, terrorizing him down the left all afternoon. Ronaldo was very unlucky not to score; he hit the bar three times. Luckily, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer (who else?) was on hand to bang home from close range the first of Ronaldo’s efforts. That made it 1-0 after 40 minutes in a game where Newcastle had defended admirablybut only up until that point. Ronaldo tore Newcastle apart in the second half, hitting the bar twice more, but it was Solskjaer again who got the crucial deflection from a shot by Nemanja Vidic early in the second half to take the game beyond Newcastle. “Marvellous,” was Sir Alex Ferguson’s reaction to Ronaldo’s performance. “But he’s been marvellous since the start of the season. Nothing fazes him; he’s got such great courage. “But I always expected him to be a great player,” he added. “I always said that I could only see greatness ahead of him.”