When Raul Gonzalez Blanco, Real Madrid totem, former captain of Spain and until last month the highest goalscorer in his country’s international history, moved to Schalke last summer, he took advice on what to expect from a former colleague and friend. He rang Ruud van Nistelrooy, who had moved from Madrid to Hamburg seven months earlier, and was told: “You’ll find things are much more open in Germany, the fans are much closer to the players. The public come to training every day, they approach you to talk. In Spain, they are kept a much greater distance.”
In this touchy-feely Bundesliga, a man needs to get along with his public. Just ask the head coach who signed Raul, among several other highly-paid players, last summer, one Felix Magath. He was obliged by his employers midway through the season to set up a Facebook account to correct a public image of hardness and inaccessibility. It would not be enough to save Magath’s job. He was fired by Schalke last month, having guided the club into the quarter-finals of the Champions League, where, under Ralf Rangnick, they meet the title-holders, Inter Milan, on Tuesday.
Schalke are not having a good season domestically but the last eight in Europe represents the sort of adventure for which Raul, three times a Champions League winner with Real, was recruited. Schalke have one senior European triumph to their name — the 1997 Uefa Cup, when they defeated Inter in the final — and the closest their supporters have been to a Champions League climax was watching the gold medals being handed to Porto’s players after the 2004 final at the AufSchalke Arena in Gelsenkirchen, a monument to a club with a patient fan base. Patient because in the past decade or so, the club have acquired a reputation as Germany’s nearly-men. Four times in 10 years they have finished second in the Bundesliga table. This season they remain in the bottom half of the division after Friday’s game at St Pauli was abandoned when a linesman was hit by a plastic cup.
They would be worse off had Raul not carried his unerring eye for goal into a new league. He has scored 12 times in the Bundesliga, many of them in the handful of handsome wins that characterised the Jekyll-and-Hyde six months that Magath oversaw this season. One week, Schalke would win big, the next they would collapse.
Paying Raul, who arrived on a free transfer, at the level he had become accustomed to at Madrid was part of a strategy to hoist Schalke, who last won the German league in 1958, from runners-up to champions. So was bringing in the Holland centre-forward Klaas-Jan Huntelaar, who is an injury doubt for Tuesday.
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Despite the possibility that Raul may not have the chance next season to add to his record number of goals in European club competitions, last week he insisted he intended to see out his contract with Schalke, which runs until June 2012, by which time he will be about to turn 35. The question of his future had been put to him because of Magath’s departure. The sacked coach, famously rigorous in the physical demands he makes of players in practice, had, Raul said, “made me feel five years younger” with his pre-season fitness regime.
Raul had become more often a substitute than a starter at Madrid and learnt from Jose Mourinho, who took over as head coach last May, that the situation was unlikely to change. The large vat of competitive instinct contained in the veteran Spaniard’s wiry frame will be much in evidence against Inter, in a competition in which he has already set several benchmarks.