Ruud van Nistelrooy left Real Madrid in January with persistent discomfort in the sole of his foot and a heaviness in his heart. His was the most dignified of the many exits of the past nine months from the Santiago Bernabeu stadium, a place of revolving doors and some confusing and individually dispiriting changes of personnel.
He departed once he realised that, with the French striker Karim Benzema and his former Manchester United colleague Cristiano Ronaldo arriving to join a squad in which the Argentine goalscorer Gonzalo Higuain was fast emerging, his opportunities, even when fit, would be limited.
Van Nistelrooy’s push for a recall to Holland’s squad for the World Cup started well once he had decided to move to the Bundesliga. He had been in a Hamburg jersey for 21 minutes when he scored his first goal for the club. He had been wearing it for 23 minutes when he collected his second. That emphatic introduction — as a substitute, in his second match against Stuttgart, having come on 11 minutes from the whistle on his debut — would have reminded his old colleague Higuain of a phrase Van Nistelrooy shared with the younger striker when they were together at Madrid. “Goals,” Van Nistelrooy told Higuain, “are like ketchup. You shake the bottle and none comes out, and then, suddenly, a whole load comes out.”
Van Nistelrooy has had some stubborn moments in front of goal with Hamburg since he began there, but his very appearance on the team-sheet against Fulham on Thursday in the first leg of the Europa League semi-final will remind the west London club of their need to keep the lid tight on this bottle for as long as they possibly can.
There are very few strikers of the 21st century who carry in them as good a guarantee of goals as Van Nistelrooy. He scored 150 times in 219 appearances for United and perhaps his most virtuoso Premier League goal came against Fulham, a mazy run from the halfway line.
He took that impressive strike rate with him to Madrid, where he scored 46 goals in 68 league matches, despite playing for much of the time alone up front in a counterattacking and often pedestrian side.
Of the United forwards to have scored in his sorts of quantities, only Denis Law and Dennis Viollet struck with greater frequency. Van Nistelrooy’s place in the history of Madrid is royal, as well: only Alfredo di Stefano, Ferenc Puskas and Hugo Sanchez scored at a better goals-per-game ratio there.
In the first two Spanish seasons, in which his body and fitness kept up with his appetite, his goals secured two championships. The third campaign was restricted by injury, his last half-season even more so. There looked an element of risk on the part of Hamburg in recruiting him, even on a free transfer.
What Hamburg noticed was that the man who had served Madrid so well in between the Spanish club’s so-called galactico eras — he was signed after Luis Figo and Zinedine Zidane had left, coincided with David Beckham for only one season, Brazil’s Ronaldo for six months and then, at the other end of his stint at the Bernabeu, with Portugal’s Ronaldo for only six months — worked like a galactico in the marketing department.
Hamburg reported last month that they were selling an average of 100 Van Nistelrooy jerseys at their stadium club shop every day. At a club striving restlessly to assert its status as one of Germany’s three former European Cup winners, the fact that Van Nistelrooy, albeit on record wages, preferred them to possible offers from the Premier League was greeted with enthusiasm.
Van Nistelrooy has scored three times since his blitz of Stuttgart. A strike against Anderlecht helped Hamburg into the quarter-finals of the Europa League, another against Standard Liege pushed them towards the semi-final. That Hamburg are hosting the Europa League final, and now stand 180 minutes away from participating in it, could set up an intriguing penultimate chapter in Van Nistelrooy’s latest adventure.