Van Nistelrooy’s heavy metal volley: Real Madrid’s great forgotten goal

Ruud van Nistelrooy has just been announced as the new PSV manager, a role he’ll take up at the start of next season and which will take his long and glittering career in a new direction.

One chapter of that career which is somehow tragically oft-forgotten is his time at Real Madrid where, as his name suggests, he was routinely rude to any La Liga defender that tried to get in his way.

By that, we mean he was so outrageously good at times he probably should have been banned from the sport for going against the spirit of football; finishing should be hard, so why was it so easy for him?

One goal that you’ve never seen encapsulated his brilliance, and highlights exactly why he could make the perfect coach to young strikers.

Rarely with impressive team goals are the finishes ever good, for they have no reason to be. They shouldn’t have to be any more than simple one-touch tap-ins after a ball across the front of goal.

Think of the hundreds of goals masterminded by Pep Guardiola; so often it’s the build-up rather than the finish that lives long in the memory.

A lot of Van Nistelrooy’s goals were like that. At Manchester United, the story is that he only ever scored one goal from outside the box, and at Real he continued his trend of being one of the finest finishers the game has ever seen.

If the ball landed at his feet anywhere in the box, the goalkeeper may as well not be there, the defenders might as well be replaced by mannequins and it may as well just be a training session rather than an actual match: he was going to score.

That’s seen him decried as a ‘tap-in’ merchant at times, but to be so good at poaching takes more than just instinct. His movement was like no one else’s.

He was a Dutch ballet artist, bounding