Raul: El Pichichi comes back to Madrid still a Real legend

Major tournaments from 2000 to 2006 bypassed a gifted generation of players of which Raul was the fulcrum, before the likes of Villa and Fernando Torres took a new wave of talent to success at Euro 2008, a tournament from which Raul was omitted by Luis Aragones. It seems unfortunate that a player who enjoyed remarkable success at club level endured disappointment for his country and that part of his career will be held as a mere slideshow to more tangible achievements.

It was a career forged on sheer determination and unerring finishing, a predatory instinct that saw him feed off any space a defender was grateful enough to afford him. Blessed with close control, fine technique and explosive power, he could take a ball in any situation and unleash it into the net with deadly ruthlessness.

They were characteristics that saw Raul register a total of 978 career games and a total of 421 goals at a rate of 0.43 goals per game. It was not Raul’s style to spurn chances. The epitome of his dedication and will to find the net were in effect on his final Madrid game as he hobbled onto a cross from Cristiano Ronaldo, whilst visibly carrying an injury, to slide the ball home with his last ever touch for the club.

He left Madrid for Schalke holding a plethora of records having surpassed both Alfredo Di Stefano as the club’s top goalscorer and Manilo Sanchez as the record league appearance holder. He remains the top currently active La Liga scorer with 228 league goals and a winner of the prestigious Marca Leyanda award back in 2009.

It was all this that earned him, together with Casillas, a “contract for life” in 2008 but after troubles with injury in 2010, it was in July when he announced his trophy-laden, award-riddled time in the Spanish capital would be over.

Lucrative offers from the United States and Qatar came in but Raul chose the Champions League of Schalke and despite a role change from main striker to playing in the gap just behind Klaas Jan-Huntelaar, the goals still flowed and so did the trophies.

Schalke won the DFB Pokal and the DFL-Supercup, as well as reaching the semi-finals of the Champions League, while Raul and Huntelaar struck a deadly partnership, the Spaniard hitting 40 goals in 98 games alongside his Dutch partner who notched 61 goals in the same two year period.

It was testament to his time in Germany that after just two years, Schalke retired his number 7 shirt out of respect for the prolific attacker who concluded his time in Europe by joining Al Sadd. Typically, he scored 9 goals in 22 appearances to win the club their first title in five years and he also became captain, his ability to become an entity that transcends the club has clearly not yet ceased.

He will be back in the Bernabeu for one night of friendly action where he will play a part in a tribute to a man he will surely join in legendary status when his career is looked at with hindsight. It was goals, goals and more goals, all done without the arrogance or hubris that flaws so many of the game’s modern pros or the indiscipline that can fall so many, he has picked up just 13 yellow cards and 0 reds during his career that is now entering its 20th year.

It will be a career that, when glanced back upon, reads a tonne of goals and an array of silverware and individual honours that span far down the page but there will be one glaring absence in his inability to win the Balon D’Or award.

It will not bother Raul too much, a player who has become synonymous with one of the world’s biggest clubs and back on that night in Zaragoza, when he was given the task of inheriting the famous role of Butragueno, it would have been impossible to predict the teenager would go on to achieve so much.