Neville recalls Ruud van Nistelrooy’s first Man Utd training session and being left in awe of ‘unbelievable’ shooting
GARY NEVILLE has revealed it took just one training session with Ruud van Nistelrooy for him to realise how good he would be for Manchester United.
The Dutch striker moved to Old Trafford for a then record £19million transfer fee from PSV back in 2001.
Neville was already established in the United first-team at that point and in the middle of his own epic career with the Red Devils.
The legendary right-back made nearly 600 appearances for the club and won eight Premier League titles and the Champions League twice.
Now he has been discussing two of the biggest arrivals at United during that period – Van Nistelrooy and Wayne Rooney.
He claims he already knew that the latter would be a success before he joined, but it was not until he witnessed the former’s shooting ability in training that he was also a ‘certainty’ to be a huge hit.
The Sky Sports pundit said: ‘There were two certainties. The one who I already knew was Wayne Rooney. It wasn’t even a risk, you just knew he would be absolutely unbelievable.
“Even though we had to wait for him to make his debut because he was injured, I never thought it would be a risk.
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“The other one I didn’t know but we spent a lot of money on him and it was Ruud van Nistelrooy.
“The first time I watched him in training, he did a shooting session and hit one and I went, ‘woah, you can’t kick a ball like that’.
“Sometimes you see things in training and just think to yourself, ‘that’s a proper player’.
“That was Ruud. He was the one who I didn’t know beforehand that I looked at straightaway in training and thought he was unbelievable.”
Van Nistelrooy scored 150 goals in 219 appearances for United over his five-year stay before joining Real Madrid in 2006.
Rooney would end his United career in 2017 as the club’s record goal scorer with a tally of 253 goals in 559 games.
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