Ruud van Nistelrooy pointed to his Man Utd glory in his very first game

Manchester United fans had to wait a while to see Ruud van Nistelrooy in red. But it didn’t take long for them to realise it was worth every minute.

Van Nistelrooy’s Manchester United debut was supposed to come long before August 2001. The Dutchman was meant to arrive a full year earlier, only for fitness concerns to delay the move and an agonising cruciate injury in training to almost scupper it altogether.

Thankfully, for United and for Van Nistelrooy, it was ultimately a mere bump in the road. When he did finally arrive, he was determined to make up for lost time.

“Strikers are always going to cost a lot these days, but if you can get one who is not only top class but still only 24, it’s even better,” Alex Ferguson said when the Netherlands international joined from PSV Eindhoven, suggesting his presence could ensure United were set for “four or five years”.

In the end, that prediction proved bang on the money, with Van Nistelrooy moving on to Real Madrid in 2006 after 150 goals in 219 United games.

And it all began with a lightning-fast start against Fulham.

The context

United were reigning league champions when Van Nistelrooy arrived, having wrapped up a third straight title with five games to spare. In one sense, they didn’t need another big-money star, but Ferguson was looking to the future.

Teddy Sheringham was the only United player to notch more than 10 league goals in the title win and was allowed to leave shortly after his 35th birthday. Andy Cole was moved on a few months later, making Van Nistelrooy very much the main man. It’s a good job he got off to a flyer, then.

Newly-promoted and newly-minted Fulham presented a potential banana-skin on the opening weekend, but United’s new recruit didn’t exactly go into the game off a standing start.

Van Nistelrooy had already netted in the Community Shield and in an August friendly for the Netherlands against England, and he was reunited with international colleague Edwin van der Sar when the Cottagers visited Old Trafford.

With Van der Sar joining from Juventus and the lethal Louis Saha keen to add to the 32 goals he scored in Fulham’s promotion campaign, Van Nistelrooy proved more important than some might have imagined that afternoon.

Saha had already scored twice, either side of a trademark David Beckham free-kick, when Van Nistelrooy struck for the first time.

It was the sort of goal we’d soon grow accustomed to seeing from the Dutch international: he was inside…