“Where will the goals come from?”

That was the question being asked by soccer pundits after Ronaldo left in the Summer. I found it quite a bemusing question, especially as it was coming from ex-professional players and “experts”.

They seemed to be overlooking the fact that United’s whole system was changed to accommodate Ronaldo and that several players had to sacrifice their own games to compensate for the fact that whilst Ronaldo could be devastating in attack, he was non-existent in defence.

For every run that Ronaldo made that resulted in a goal, there were ten that ended with him sitting on his backside waving his arms in the air.

For every “wonder” Ronaldo free kick, there were twenty that ended up in Row Z.

For every penalty that Ronaldo scored, there were the odd couple that were missed (although he tended to reserve these for the really important occasions).

The brilliant Wayne Rooney was expected to sacrifice a large part of his game to make way for Ronaldo.

The likes of Fletcher and the other midfielders were expected to stay back instead of getting forward because you never quite knew when Ronaldo’s play was going to end in a goal or him sat on the deck.

The question should have been, “How will Ronaldo replace his incredible teammates?” because Manchester United have seen big player after big player go but the Fergie juggernaut has always rolled on.

Valencia has come in and has already surpassed his tally as a Wigan player and he is on target to score around 12-14 goals this season. That means that we might just have to find about 10 goals from elsewhere to replace Ronaldo’s tally from last season.

Berbatov and Owen have been finding the net.

Mame Diouf looks like he could score for fun given the chance.

But the main beneficiary of Ronaldo’s departure has been Wayne Rooney.

No longer expected to lurk out on the left wing, he has been given license to play wherever he chooses and this has obviously been in front of goal.

It now looks long odds-on that he will surpass his previous goalscoring tallies by a considerable margin (I would not bet against him scoring more than 33 goals this season – depending on how far we go in the Champions League).

Our goals per game ratio so far this season is in excess of last season (or indeed the season before when Ronaldo scored his mind-blowing 42 goals).

The fact is that despite Ronaldo leaving (and, dare I say it, despite Tevez leaving) we HAVE replaced the goals.

We currently sit on top of the Premier League table and we have outscored everyone in the Premier League except Arsenal.

Where did all those goals come from?