Also this is a final and very few have better credentials than this man in clutch games:
Zinedine Zidane
For a player whose stunning career ended in a shocking act of violence, Zidane was one of the most graceful and poetic players to ever grace a football field.
When the ball was at his feet it was almost as if time had momentarily stopped and we were all transfixed by his majesty. The Frenchman is one of the few players to score in two separate World Cup finals, winning the illustrious competition just once in 1998. He was also instrumental in Les Bleus European Championship win two years later and just two years after that scored probably the finest goal in Champions League history. Not bad for a player who is best remembered for a head butt.
A dazzling name. A dazzling player. Zinedine Zidane rolls off the tongue as smoothly as his studs rolled over the ball mid-pirouette time after time to produce that turn christened in his honour.
Everything about Zidane flowed. His elegant style, the multitudinous accolades, the abundant trophies.
Scorer in a World Cup final victory, scorer in a Champions League final victory (and what a goal), Ballon d’Or and World Player of the Year winner.
On top of the world: Zinedine Zidane (centre), heads his second goal in the 1998 World Cup final
Greatest hit: Zidane scores the famous volley for Real Madrid in the 2002 Champions League final
There were times when the force of his play and personality alone dragged his club and country from mediocrity to magnificence.
He was called God by Thierry Henry, The Master by Pele, and The King by Michel Platini. You almost get the sense Jesus Christ would be miffed at being left out of comparisons. Mind you, for all his achievements Zidane never played on water.
Zidane always was a man for big moments on big occasions.
He was sent off, after a nudge from officials by the touchline with access to television replays, and France lost the subsequent penalty shootout.
Having pretty much single-handedly got his nation to the final, with goals in the last-16 against Spain and semi-final against Portugal, Zidane, who opened the scoring in the Berlin final with an outrageous Panenka penalty, was pictured walking past the golden trophy, head bowed, on his way to an early bath never to kick a football with meaning again.
A mentor of mine once argued that there are two kinds of people. Those who leave you feeling better after you've been in their company and those who leave you feeling worse. In elite football, the most pertinent distinction is between the players who shrink in the biggest matches and the ones who grow.
After watching Zinedine Zidane in both legs of the Real Madrid-Manchester United Champions League quarter-final it was as if he had been tattooed on one's retinas. It's hard to recall a significant phase of either game in which he failed to play a role.
It's incredible to think that at Euro 96 some people thought he lacked the stomach for a big occasion. Since then,
he has provided the inspiration for France's World Cup (1998) and European Championship (2000) victories and made certain of Real's Champions League win last season with a volley of astonishing prowess.
Zidane is one of the few footballers of the post-Pele generation
who can be coupled with the word genius without the language police pounding up the stairs in the dead of night. Johan Cruyff and Diego Maradona are others. It's probably a lot easier to respond to the carpe diem imperative when you open your tool box and see all the necessary equipment. But it still requires character to assert itself in support of natural ability.
"Cometh the Hour" was the great advertising hook that was attached to David Beckham before last summer's World Cup. With his broken metatarsal barely healed and a hamstring strain giving him grief, the England captain was demonstrably unfit to answer that call, though he did manage to cometh with a cathartic, high pressure penalty against Argentina.
He cameth again against Madrid this week when he scored two goals after replacing Juan Sebastian Veron. Wherever he starts next season, the important thing is that Beckham the footballer isn't submerged by Beckham the celebrity.
You can argue all you like about his technical failings: his one-footedness, his lack of natural winger's pace. But nobody has yet dared to assert that he looks for a shadow in which to hide when an opponent turns up the sun. England's World Cup qualifiers at home against Finland and Greece can be cited as prime examples of him dragging a whole team forward by the neck. Beckham will probably never be able to run a game through technical virtuosity alone.
But sometimes in 'ugly' matches force of character can have the same effect. The time to give up on Beckham is if he falls so deeply in love with his image that his testosterone ceases to flow.
However much he grooms himself, he still answers a compulsion to master his opponent - to perform whole-heartedly and to prevail. This week, the pen hovered over a ballot paper from the Football Writers' Association.
It's time for us crows on the wire to nominate our footballer of the year. As the mind lurches this way and that, judgement has one reliable anchor. You can't go far wrong if you stick with the people who maintain or preferably raise their normal standard when the heat is on. The bigger the game, the tighter Zidane's hold on the pattern and rhythm.
Funnily enough, this principle works just as well on Hackney Marshes. The phrase 'big game' is relative. It might be in the Essex Pubs Cup final that one puffing player surpasses himself, wins the game on his own. Sport's highly personal function is to help you find out what you're capable of. And we all know people who took negative self-readings from sport and then turned in on themselves.
Looking inwards at the Premiership, it's safe to bet your house on Alan Shearer and Ruud van Nistelrooy but maybe not, so far, on Thierry Henry, who is sometimes so preoccupied with earning points for artistic merit that he forgets to stick the wretched thing in the net. Sorry. There is no intention here to disparage a genuinely terrific player. But some line has to be drawn between deserving causes. On Wednesday, Zidane burnt that line on the grass with his toes.
Among contemporary giants, Patrick Vieira is another who can piggy-back 10 team-mates through rough waters. Roy Keane used to be able to do it. These days, though, the spirit is more willing than the flesh. Rio Ferdinand is another who's not coping - for entirely separate reasons to Keane.
The beauty of this Premiership title race denouement is that both contenders ought to be capable of winning all their remaining games. So the question becomes: which of them finds the idea of failure most repugnant? Who rises highest on the stick that measures the inner man?
Too romantic, too abstract? Possibly. Maybe luck will have the final call (a deflected shot here, a missed offside there). But this year my pen moved across the Football Writers' ballot paper with unusual conviction. It wrote the name of a big game hunter who responded to United scoring against Real Madrid by seizing the ball and running back to the centre circle, all the while thrusting his fist at the crowd and exhorting them to keep faith. It wrote: Ruud van Nistelrooy.
Those setups are super attacking, considering the opposition.
