Last action Hierro

On a gentle summer morning in 1999 Fernando Hierro, the Real Madrid captain, scored a goal in a pre-season practice game. But the referee, who happened to be John Toshack, the Real coach at the time, disallowed it for offside. It was only a seven-a-side knock-about, 10 minutes each half, in a small town in Switzerland but Hierro was livid. He ran towards the ball, picked it up and kicked it furiously, high in the air.
When the game ended a few minutes later Hierro stormed off the pitch, in a dreadful huff. Toshack reached out to touch his arm, as if to say: 'Fernando, please, it's not such a big deal.' But Hierro brushed him off, brutally, without even a glance.

It is Manchester United's misfortune that Hierro should have timed his return from injury after two months away to coincide perfectly with Tuesday's Champions League quarter-final first leg at the Bernabeu. He had his first outing yesterday against Rayo Vallecano and ought to arrive refreshed and raring to go for what in Spain they consider to be the biggest fixture in the international football calendar.

Hierro, which means 'iron' in Spanish, is the defensive rock on which Real Madrid's astonishing success of recent years has been built. An experienced old dog who has won three European Cups and five Spanish titles, he is big, tall, hard as nails, excellent in the air, in his positioning, in the timing of his tackles. But, like Roy Keane, he is more than the sum of his parts. As he showed in that training-ground spat with Toshack four years ago and has shown a thousand times since in his exchanges with team-mates as well as referees, he is a man who hates to lose.

After a particularly impressive display of outraged petulance with a referee in a home game against Villareal last October, the press subjected him to a rare grilling. But Hierro did not budge an inch. 'My team has to win and I will do everything I can to achieve that objective,' he said. 'That is the way I am, for better or for worse. Probably that is why I have reached as far as I have. I like to win and I don't mean to hide it.'

Speaking to the press last week about the impending clasico , as they call it in Spain, against Manchester United, Hierro made no effort to hide that his goal is not merely to beat the richest club, with the most fans, in world football, but to go on and 'achieve something historic'. Namely 'emulating the great Milan side that won two successive European Cups in the early 1990s.' And, he might have added, seeking to match the magnificent Real side of the 1950s and 1960s that left such an indelible mark, as he never tires of reminding us, in the mind of Alex Ferguson. Because, as every schoolboy knows, on paper there is no one who can touch this Real side. 'This current team is scary,' acknowledged Hierro. 'Potentially, it's outrageous. But we're still in a phase of adaptation, of getting used to one another. We have five or six, or more, of the best 10 players in the world - magnificent footballers, a spectacle.'

THE BIG FIVE , as every schoolboy also knows, are Roberto Carlos, Zinedine Zidane, Luis Figo, Ronaldo and Raúl. The sixth - and this is probably what he was getting at in the press conference - might be Hierro himself. Outside Spain he has never had the recognition he deserves but the fact is that,if you look beyond the fierce, frighteningly taut defender what you see is a player of extraordinary class. You would have to search all the way back to Bobby Moore to find a defender so elegant on the ball, with such aplomb coming out of defence. But the truly amazing quality he has, what makes him a man apart, is the ability to put the ball in the back of the net.

Until Raúl overtook him last month, Hierro had been the top scorer in the history of the Spanish national team, with 29 goals in 89 games. For Real Madrid he's scored more than 100 goals, at a rate of one every five games. Neither Moore nor Franco Baresi nor any other great central-defender has ever come close to matching that scoring record. Moore scored two goals in 108 international appearances; Baresi one in 81. Franz Beckenbauer, who today we would probably describe as a defensive midfielder, scored 14 in 103.

What's the story here? How does one explain this seeming aberration. Partly it is to do with the fact that as a teenager he played at inside-forward and when he began his professional career he played in midfield. In the 1991-92 season he was Real Madrid's top scorer, with 21 goals. But that does not explain how it is that he has kept scoring, why for over a decade he has been number-one penalty-taker for club and country, why he has scored so many goals from free-kicks, bending the ball round and over defensive walls better than Raúl and at least as reliably as Zidane and Roberto Carlos.

In so far as there is any explanation, it is this: as Santiago Segurola of El País , the best football writer in Spain, puts it, 'Hierro is a defender with a forward's soul.' Which may be partly why when he is playing he always looks so tense. He is concentrating hard to stop the other side from scoring, but somewhere deep down he is thinking: 'Why am I not up front doing what God ordained I should be doing and scoring goals?'

THERE IS SOMETHING of the caged tiger about Hierro in defence, something of the angry misfit, as he himself is quite ready to admit. 'I watch the game unfolding up front from my position in defence,' he said in an interview last year, 'and many times I say to myself, "What a shame I can't go up there and have a shot." I know I wasn't born to be a defender.'

Yet as the statistics show, every title Real Madrid have won in his time has been when he has played at centre-half. 'As I don't have the defender's mindset,' he says, 'everything I've achieved as a defender has been the consequence of getting it wrong on many occasions, of making lots of mistakes and learning from them. I've really had to work at my defending. When I've been playing badly, I've watched myself a lot on video. What I look for are my weaknesses, because those you can correct.'

Six out of his eight coaches at Real Madrid have agreed that his weaknesses as a midfielder exceeded his weaknesses in defence. The basic problem was that he tended in too many games to be be off the pace - a physically imposing but often ineffective presence in a blur of midfield traffic. The languid elegance that catches the eye as he comes out of defence with the ball at his feet was a liability in the middle of the pitch. But his ability on the ball is more than eye-catching. It is a major weapon in the already phenomenal Real armoury. He is tidy on the ball with an excellent first touch, which is itself a great comfort to the rest of the team. But where he comes into his own is in his attacking player's vision of the game and his ability accurately - and to the delight of the rampaging Ronaldo - to place the long ball.

THERE IS TALK he might not continue at Real when his contract ends this summer. Probably foolish talk. Reports of his impending obsolescence have been circulating in the Spanish press for some time. Undoubtedly, as he himself seemed to recognise when he called an end to his international career last summer, he has slowed down - there is a certain rigidity in his movement these days. But it is a fine point whether Hierro's value as a defender has appreciated or depreciated with the passage of time.

The fact is, though, that the clock is ticking on Hierro's career. Not fast enough for Manchester United, but when the time comes everyone at Real Madrid knows that they will find it impossible to replace him. He is one of a kind, as he himself has had the wisdom - and the arrogance - to understand. 'If people think that in the future there will be another player like me,' he has said, 'they are mistaken. Me, they will not be able to clone.'