Ruud van Nistelrooy still can't understand a word Nicky Butt says. So dense is Butt's Mancunian mumble that the Dutch striker has to ask Jaap Stam to interpret. However, Van Nistelrooy is learning fast. Every day he practises his Mancunian accent, teaching himself to say 'Butty' while distorting the U and omitting the Ts: 'Boo'ey'. After just one month at Old Trafford, his English is already deteriorating.
Ian Rush said of his time in Italy that it was like a foreign country. Van Nistelrooy must know what he means. Although his whole life has been a preparation for this moment, he has never experienced anything like Old Trafford before. No player in the United squad has travelled further to arrive here. On 1 July, 1976, the day Patrick Kluivert was born in Amsterdam, Van Nistelrooy came to earth in the southern Dutch town of Oss. (That's the story anyway; it's more likely that they were separated at birth).
Kluivert's parents were Surinamese immigrants, his father a former footballer whose name is still legendary in the Dutch West Indies. While at primary school, the boy joined Ajax. Kluivert was born to greatness. Van Nistelrooy had to achieve it through his deeds. His father was a radiator mechanic, his grandfather a cattle farmer, his first football club named Nooit Gedacht (Never Thought Of It) and he grew up in entirely the wrong place. Van Nistelrooy was raised in the village of Geffen near Eindhoven, south of the great rivers that dissect the Netherlands. This is the province of Brabant, where the people are Catholics, more friendly and much less arrogant than in the north. They are more like Belgians than Dutchmen.
The Dutch south doesn't produce footballers, just cyclists. Almost all the country's great players - Cruyff, Van Hanegem, Krol, Rensenbrink, Van Basten, Gullit, Rijkaard, the De Boers, Bergkamp, Kluivert and Davids, to name a few - are from north of the great rivers, mostly from Amsterdam or neighbouring towns like Utrecht. Of current Dutch internationals, only Van Nistelrooy and Boudewijn Zenden (a Maastricht boy) are from south of the rivers. The south doesn't produce footballers because it doesn't educate them properly. At Nooit Gedacht, Van Nistelrooy was raised by cheerful volunteers who, the Dutch would say, knew no more about football than the average Englishman (sorry).
Van Nistelrooy, though not an exceptional talent, was dedicated to becoming a professional footballer. He was diligent at school, but spent the rest of his time kicking balls against garage doors and writing to footballers for autographs. 'On my birthday a picture with autograph arrived from John Bosman,' he recalled recently in the Dutch magazine Voetbal International. But he remains critical of the former Ajax keeper Stanley Menzo: 'Menzo had been trying to see if his pen worked, so there were scrawls on the photograph. I thought that was very careless.' This is how Dutch kids follow football: they follow players rather than teams. When Van Nistelrooy joined Manchester United, the British press ritually asked him whether he had supported the club as a child.
To Van Nistelrooy, the question made no sense. He had supported Marco van Basten. Aged 14, he left Nooit Gedacht for mighty Margriet in Oss. Soon FC Den Bosch, a local professional club, invited him for a trial match. The Den Bosch youth coach still remembers that after Van Nistelrooy scored in the game, instead of remaining blase like a normal Dutch kid, he raced off cheering. At 17 Van Nistelrooy made his debut for Den Bosch. He spent two more years at the club, mainly playing in central midfield, while Kluivert was scoring the winner in a Champions League final and playing for Holland.
Then, to Van Nistelrooy's tremendous excitement, he was signed by Heerenveen. It was here that a metamorphosis began. Until then Van Nistelrooy had been a clumsy player, quick and eager but with mediocre ball control and a modest reading of the game. In 1997, one Kluivert was worth about 30 Van Nistelrooys. But Foppe de Haan, the Heerenveen manager, decided that the player had something - in particular, his peculiar broad feet, which, the manager thought, had as much feeling as other people have in their hands. He sent Van Nistelrooy to a Holland match to study Dennis Bergkamp.
Desperate to learn, developing from slender youth into brawny man, and blessed with those broad feet, in nine months Van Nistelrooy outgrew Heerenveen. In 1998 PSV Eindhoven bid £4.7 million for him. It was the highest fee ever paid by a Dutch club, and everyone said it was ridiculous, but he went to Eindhoven and was told he would start on the bench. He was then still mainly an attacking midfielder. Bobby Robson was lucky enough to be PSV's manager that year. Muddling along without discernible tactics, the club was saved by Van Nistelrooy, who scored 31 league goals. He got to this point without much coaching, and it shows. Van Nistelrooy is a footballer from the Netherlands but not a 'Dutch' footballer, just as Stam (another Dutch provincial) isn't a 'Dutch' footballer while David Beckham (blond, beautiful pass, can't tackle, in love with himself) is a Dutch player.
Again, the comparison with Kluivert is useful. Kluivert was raised the archetypal Dutch footballer. He is always looking for the clever pass, never blasts at goal from a stupid angle or tries to beat two defenders for speed. That would be vulgar. Kluivert misses simple chances because anyone can score from a simple chance. Only proper footballers can give a clever pass.
Van Nistelrooy plays like a South American: sprinting, pushing, throwing himself every which way, shooting all the time. His physique is similar to Kluivert's (are they by any chance related?) but he uses it more. Van Basten is his hero, yet the striker Van Nistelrooy resembles most is Gabriel Batistuta. Both are all-round players built like bulls (both, curiously, with a family background in cattle farming) and neither wastes many shots. They almost always put the ball between the posts. It is a directness that other Dutch players disdain. Van Nistelrooy knows this. By the end of the 1990s, he was a more effective striker than Bergkamp, but he would have been horrified at the thought of taking Bergkamp's place in the Dutch team. Bergkamp is Dutch football made flesh (or at least bone). Van Nistelrooy was just a country bumpkin who scored goals.
In October, 1999 I saw him play for Holland against Brazil. He had obviously decided that in this exalted company his method of bursting through defences and scoring had to be ditched. Instead, he played like a third-rate Kluivert, passing to no discernible end. Yet by this time Eindhoven airport was virtually scheduling extra flights to accommodate the influx of foreign football managers. Arsene Wenger came to watch PSV, Gianluca Vialli saw him for Chelsea, Real Madrid wanted him for their collection and he was fashionable in Italy. No wonder: 23 matches into the 1999-2000 season, he had 29 league goals and was chasing the 43-year-old Dutch record of 43.
Spookily, it was the third time in a decade that the Eindhoven club had found itself with the best young striker in the world: the previous two had been Romario and Ronaldo. This augurs well for the 22-year-old Yugoslav striker Mateja Kezman, who in his first season with PSV last year scored 24 league goals.
Van Nistelrooy could have gone anywhere. He thought the Italian league was the best in the world, but feared that it was too difficult for strikers. English football seemed more suited to his direct and simple style. He was probably won for Manchester United by his meetings with Alex Ferguson. To Van Nistelrooy, it must have been like meeting Van Basten, or even Stanley Menzo. Ferguson was a famous football manager! Of course he agreed to sign. Maybe he got an autograph in return.
In his autobiography, Ferguson writes: 'I was quite excited, for I could tell just by looking into his eyes that this was a young man of substance.' One sees what he means. Van Nistelrooy lives for football. An intelligent and sensible man, he never gets into the scandals that have embroiled Kluivert. The one blemish on his reputation was the claim by opponents two years ago that he occasionally dived. This briefly earned him the nickname Ruudje Mattheus, after the former German footballer who is regarded in Holland as the consummate diver. In March 2000 things began to go wrong for Ruudje Mattheus. First, he injured a knee, and failed his medical at United.
Then, on the morning of Friday 28 April, while he was practising headers at PSV, his cruciate ligament gave way. By chance a local television station was filming him, and many Dutch fans can still hear him scream. The next day at 8am, when Van Nistelrooy was still asleep, Ferguson telephoned to promise that whatever happened he would be coming to United. Soon afterwards he visited the player at home. Van Nistelrooy had surgery in Vail, Colorado. He watched Euro 2000 from there on satellite television, touching the Dutch by waving his crutches frantically in the air whenever Holland scored.
It took nearly a year for his knee to recover. In March 2001 he returned to football. In April, in camp with the Dutch national team preparing for a match against Cyprus, he told his team-mates at lunch that he had signed for United. They gave him an ovation. Maybe it's a front, perhaps Van Nistelrooy is a bad guy underneath, but everyone who has met him seems to like him. 'He's just a good spontaneous guy,' says Stam.
Van Nistelrooy came on as a sub for Holland against Cyprus and scored. In June, he came on as a sub against Estonia and scored twice. This is worth mentioning because these are his sole appearances in competitive internationals. He has also played a handful of matches in the first round of the Champions League. In all his career he has played perhaps six competitive matches against top-class teams. In short, at 25 he has less big-match experience than Luke Chadwick, baby of the United squad.
Van Nistelrooy may look a great striker, but he has never been tested. He also has a damaged knee. On paper, he isn't worth £19 million (but then they don't play on paper). If anyone knows what it's like to return from serious injury it is Ronaldo. After watching Van Nistelrooy play for Holland this spring, the Brazilian told the Dutch magazine Johan: 'I was impressed by his eagerness. It showed that he doesn't have any more fear. That's the most important thing. That you can do what occurs to you, that you feel your body won't let you down.' (Ronaldo added that he wanted one of Van Nistelrooy's shirts. He may need it: collecting clothes is the Brazilian's hobby, and he changes outfits about six times a day.)
Van Nistelrooy is indeed playing like a man who has never been injured. The Dutchman has scored freely in the pre-season, and already United's fans have invented a chant for him ('Ruuuuud!'). He is also bonding with the players. In Singapore, they went out one night as a group, starting in the bar of the Raffles Hotel and proceeding through town. Both Van Nistelrooy and Veron - who speaks no Mancunian - said they were impressed. This did not happen in Italy, Veron conveyed.
Van Nistelrooy has begun making friends with Butt and Gary Neville - more influential off the field at United than on it - and he hasn't stopped there. He has gone around Old Trafford and the training ground at Carrington shaking hands with secretaries, security men and groundsmen: 'Hello, I'm Ruud.' He and Fabien Barthez (a friendly man with a gift for physical comedy beloved by children) are improving United's image. Van Nistelrooy isn't soft, though. At a recent training session, he chastised Roy Keane about a pass. Untried and damaged he may be, but he will be fine at United.
