Champions League: Top 5 contenders for the Golden Boot
This season's Champions League is gradually drawing to a close, as we are halfway through the quarterfinals, with the last four just a week from being decided.
There have been exciting matches throughout the tourney, while upsets aplenty have also been recorded, with Ajax perhaps being the revelation of the season as they continue to forge on despite being unheralded at the start of the campaign.
Major heavyweights such as Bayern Munich, Atletico Madrid, Real Madrid, and PSG have been knocked out, while the likes of Barcelona, Juventus, and Liverpool all live to fight another day.
At this stage, most attention is on which team will conquer in Madrid come June and rightly so, as the Champions League is the most prestigious club competition in the world.
However, beyond the thrill of knowing who would lift 'The Big Ears' at Atletico's magnificent Wanda Metropolitano, there is also the 'small' matter of the Champions League Golden Boot.
The award is given to any individual who outscored every other person in the season and has been won by some of the most legendary names in history including Raul, Ruud Van Nistelrooy, Kaka, Andriy Shevchenko and of course the eternal pair of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi.
The Portuguese is the record winner of the award, having won it a total of seven times, with the last six coming consecutively. In this piece, we shall be having a rundown of the top five players who are still active in the competition and have a chance to win this season's Champions League Golden Boot.
#5 Cristiano Ronaldo (Juventus) - 5 goals
The Portuguese international is a perennial contender for anything named Golden Boot, and his appetite for goalscoring does not seem to have waned despite having turned 34 in February.
Ronaldo's stats are ridiculously good bordering on unbelievable, particularly in the Champions League.
With 125 goals, he is the tournament's all-time record goalscorer and would be looking to add to his tally of seven UCL Golden Boots come the end of the season.
Having started the season in rather poor terms, scoring just one goal from his first six matches in the group stage, Ronaldo has roared back in some style, netting a hat-trick in the last round to eliminate Atletico Madrid while he also added to his tally with a flying nodder against Ajax and would be looking at using the return leg to further increase his chances of winning an eighth consecutive UCL Golden Boot.
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