The attention during Manchester United’s game away to Newcastle wasn’t only on Van der Sar ending his clean sheet record or on Rooney scoring yet again since coming back from injury. One more time, Cristiano Ronaldo grabbed the headlines after being involved in a naughty incident that happened towards the end of the first half involving Magpie Steven Taylor.

The Newcastle player appeared to have harshly slapped Ronaldo on the face but then escaped a deserved red card.

According to the media, a dispute between the guilty one Steve Taylor and the victim Cristiano Ronaldo broke out in the tunnel at half-time where The Sun reported that Ronaldo would have told Taylor, “Your style of football is s***,” to which the defender would have replied, “Well you are ugly!”

The story was different though in the Daily Express which rather stated that it was Wayne Rooney who had confronted the 23 year old Magpie saying, “You’ve always been a s*** footballer,” with Taylor retorting to Wazza, “I might be a s*** player but at least I’m not ugly like you. You’ll always be ugly.”

Whatever was said between the lads down the tunnel will always remain unknown. What we all saw is that Taylor had a brutal and unprofessional tackle on Ronaldo which should have seen him earn a red card and apologize to the Portuguese.

That didn’t happen though, but Ronaldo nevertheless believes that all the fouls he suffers on the pitch from opponents are totally unintentional.

“On the pitch I’m a target for defenders, so it’s difficult to avoid certain things,” he said.

“But I don’t believe people just want to do something wrong on purpose. In my experience, the game is not carried out that way. I’ve never had any serious problems,” he explained.

“I do remember when a goalkeeper said that the only way to stop United is to target Ronaldo – I went on to score two past him.

“But I don’t agree when people say that to stop United, you only need to stop Cristiano. I don’t like it when people say that,” Ronaldo continued.

So if we take in consideration Cristiano Ronaldo’s thought on the defenders that tackle him harshly on the pitch, doesn’t it sound ugly for Steven Taylor to have reacted like that?

Written by: Angela Asante