Becks reigns in Spain

El Pais, Spain's leading daily, summed up the prevailing view in an article published a few weeks before the signing was announced. Having agreed that Beckham might do wonders for Real's bank balance, El Pais asked: 'Do the same favourable conditions exist on the footballing as on the economic terrain? No. Beckham is a player for whom there is no need in this Real Madrid. Nothing that he does adds footballing value to the team.'

Javier Clemente, the well-known former coach of the Spanish national team, made the same point more bluntly. 'I think that the decision to buy Beckham is a mistake as he is very expensive,' he said. 'Besides, Real don't need him as they already have Figo.'

Similarly disparaging noises were heard outside Spain. Uli Hoeness, the Bayern Munich general manager, said Beckham's signing confirmed his view that Real Madrid had 'turned themselves from a football club into a circus act'.

Brian Clough was characteristically forthright. 'David is the best in the world with a dead ball. But that alone won't be enough down there. His problem is that he's a pony without a trick. It won't take long for defenders in the Spanish league to work him out.'

As if all that weren't bad enough, the lad from Leytonstone and his wife Victoria had to learn a new language, new customs; and he had to adapt to a new set of players after leaving a club that had been like a family to him more than half his life. English players do not have a good record of adjusting to life abroad, even in circumstances less challenging than those Beckham faced. There is a fine line between bravery and foolhardiness and in joining Real - the most glamorous, most successful but most exacting club in world football - Beckham seemed to have crossed it.

So what happened, then? How has the most famous living Englishman done since his arrival in Spain exactly six months ago today?

The Asian tour: maybe he's not such a ponce after all
Two things happened early on that did Beckham no harm at all. First, there was Real Madrid's pre-season tour of Asia, a part of the world where the suggestion that Beckham is not, in every respect, the greatest human being alive, would be widely considered a sacrilege. Second, Real signed as their new coach Carlos Queiroz - who not only spoke good English, but was also well known to Beckham having spent the previous season as No.2 to Sir Alex Ferguson.

The tour went well, chiefly because it served to undermine the general notion that Beckham was a strutting nancy boy. It came as no surprise to anybody when he scored from a free-kick in a 3-0 victory over FC Tokyo but what really did raise the eyebrows of players and fans alike was the amount of running he put in. The club's in-house statistics proved it - Beckham covered more kilometres per game than anyone.

AS, the best written of Spain's many sports dailies, went further. It expressed surprise at how 'the delicate sex symbol' had become transformed on the pitch into 'a building site labourer', and went on to note that when Beckham moved during that Tokyo game from his habitual position on the right to central midfield, 'the team's sails puffed up, the ship flew'.

Mallorca 1: We told you so
The Beckham-bashers, made anxious by the Asian experience, recovered their composure after Beckham's first competitive game on Spanish soil. It was the first leg of the Super Cup (basically Spain's Charity Shield) away to Mallorca. Beckham appeared out of his depth and Queiroz took him off 35 minutes before the end.

'Beckham looked like he did whenever Manchester United played in Spain,' Michel, a former Real Madrid star and Spanish international, told Spanish TV viewers. 'The Englishman couldn't adapt to the Iberian pace, passion, pressure - or greatness.'

Despite Real losing that Mallorca game 2-1 Beckham did have the gumption to appear before the Press and confess that he had not played well. 'I can do a lot better,' he said. 'It's a tough challenge but if I didn't believe I could do the job I wouldn't have taken it on.'

Few were convinced. Not even Queiroz, who sought to calm nerves but only triggered more alarm bells when he said: 'I have spoken to David and told him not to worry about trying to be like Zidane or Figo. I also told him not to worry about the criticism. You don't climb a mountain in one step, you have to go bit by bit.'

Mallorca 2: Glory, glory
It took just four days for Queiroz to be proved wrong; Michel and company, spectacularly wrong. Beckham did climb a mountain in one step.

His home debut at the Bernabeu in the return leg against Mallorca was a stunning success. Real won 3-0, thus lifting their first trophy of the season, and Beckham scored the decisive third goal. From a header, from a Ronaldo cross - a reversal of the script so implausible you'd have bet your house against it happening.

Three days later the serious business began. The start of La Liga. Real at home against Betis, having just the day before lost their midfield linchpin, Claude Makelele, to Chelsea. And what happens?

Beckham scores again, once more from a Ronaldo pass. Within minutes. The very first goal of the Spanish league season.

What's more, he plays a commanding role throughout the game. El Pais, typically spare in its praise, suddenly declares him to be 'an excellent footballer'.

After the game, which Real won 2-1, a Betis player, Capi, further reinforced the dawning perception that Beckham, contrary to expectations, was no shirker. 'Apart from striking the ball well he knows how to put the boot in when he has to.'

Game, set and match
Since that Betis game it has been up, up all the way. And steeply so. By mid-September, within two weeks of the start of the season, he had just about everybody in his pocket.

Talking to the exquisitely fussy Real fans, a point you hear again and again from them is this: it took us four months to warm to Zidane and nine months to warm to Ronaldo, but with Beckham it has been love at first sight.

What sealed it was a 50-yard pass he delivered in Real Madrid's epic 7- 2 victory in mid- September against Valladolid, a respectable mid-table team, level on points today with Barcelona. The ball dropped like a dead thing at the feet of Zidane, who smashed it into the back of the net on the volley, on the run. Goal of the season anywhere, right there.

'Beyond the ad campaigns, the dyed hair, the changes of look, the premature autobiography and the famous singer wife, the Englishman is making it plain that he is also a quite fabulous football player,' Marca, Spain's other big sports daily, wrote after that match.

After Real Madrid's defeat of Marseille a few days later in the first game of the Champions League, Beckham's mother told Florentino Perez that her son was the happiest man in the world. Perez asked Beckham if it was true and he said it was indeed.

More reasons to be happy
1. His team mates love him
Whatever initial suspicion there might have been about Beckham the Celeb quickly faded away. First, because he does not play the Celeb. 'In the dressing room he is shy,' a Real player observed in the early days of the season. 'He does not talk much at all, even in English. Eyes down usually, when he looks up he looks up sideways. But he is always nice to everyone. We see him as a good bloke.'

Raul, the Real captain, is not the most effusive of characters. But with Beckham, even he has not held back.

'David helps me be a more effective player because of his quality and vision, and because those passes he makes are magnificent for a forward,' said the three-time European Cup winner. 'Also, physically he is very strong. He has won the respect of all his team-mates and the fans.'

Go to a Real training session and you will see Raul's words played out. You will also see Beckham has lost that initial timidity. No one doubts his seriousness and professionalism but he also kids around a lot with other players.

And when he does it is often with the lesser figures in the team - the reserve goalkeeper Cesar, or the rather oafish fourth-choice centre half Ruben. As if to reinforce the point that he does not see himself as a superior figure, as if to make the point that he really does see himself, within the team, as one more.

Ronaldo, on the other hand, sees the England captain as one of the chosen ones. 'He is so good,' the former world player of the year observed, 'he could have been born a Brazilian.'

2. The fans love him
I went a month ago to watch a game on TV at a bar in Barcelona, a Real enclave deep in the Catalan heartland, and I asked a dozen of the locals at half-time who they thought the best player of the season had been so far.

No one hesitated. Everyone, without exception, said it was Beckham.

Why, I asked? 'Because he has cojones,' said one. 'Yes, the biggest cojones in the team,' said another. 'He is like Roy Keane for Manchester United - the leader, the fighter, especially when things are tough.'

And what else? 'He passes the ball better than anyone. Yes, he puts the ball exactly where he wants to put it.'

They fell completely, finally, inexorably in love with him a few weeks later when Real Madrid beat Barcelona at the Nou Camp for the first time in 20 years.

It was not that he played especially well, though he showed his usual fighting spirit, but how he reacted when the final whistle blew: running towards Roberto Carlos, his best friend in the team and on the day the best player on the pitch, hugging him and jumping up and down with him in the middle of the pitch as if he had just won the World Cup Final.

As if, in other words, he had been a Real fan all his life.

3. The press love him
Beckham did his first round of big Spanish interviews in early December, in each case visiting the head offices of the radio stations and newspapers.

Each report described in vivid detail everything Beckham did or said, from the minute he entered the building to the moment he left. The result was so gushing it was almost embarrassing. The hacks, even those long in the tooth, fell at his feet.

'He was polite to everybody,' a senior journalist at Cadena Ser, Spain's biggest radio station, marvelled after Beckham's threeanda-half hours with them. 'Charming and patient to all the secretaries, who queued up to get their picture taken with him. And, not only in the interview we did on air but also in the conversation we had with him over lunch, he never put a foot wrong. He is an absolute professional on and off the pitch.'

The editor of AS, Alfredo Relano, a football writer who has seen it all, was equally impressed: 'We have understood through seeing him that the England captain's armband is not given to just any player.'

Soon afterwards, when Beckham was kept on the bench during a meaningless Champions League game against Porto (Real having already won the group), another AS journalist recorded the Bernabeu's frustration. 'Going to see Real Madrid without Beckham,' he wrote, 'is like going to Paris and not seeing the Eiffel Tower.'

4. The pundits love him
Apart from the journalists, there were the army of coaches and former coaches, players and former players that needed convincing.

Not any more. Former Spain coach Clemente, who back in the summer flatly declared Beckham's signing to be a mistake, just as flatly, and without the slightest apology, said this when asked how Real Madrid had improved this season: 'In Beckham, many believed he only knew how to cross the ball, but they have discovered that he is much more than that. Because if you can cross like him you know how to pass. And if you know how to pass, you know how to play football.'

The club loves him
At one level the club loves him because he has fulfilled his money-making potential. It is impossible to measure exactly how much he represents in terms of sponsorship deals with Audi, Siemens and Pepsi. What one can do is measure shirt sales. Beckham has sold one million of his No. 23 white ones; the rest of the team combined sold only 700,000.

Not only has Florentino Perez, one of the hardest men in football, actually said, 'We love Beckham.' So has Jorge Valdano, the Argentine World Cup winner who is the club's director of sport. 'Beckham has given us something we needed,' he said.

'A willingness to sacrifice himself for the team in midfield and bags of quality. He is one of those rare players who give you both quality and quantity.'

Even Valdano's fellow countryman Alfredo di Stefano has been convinced. 'Everybody was wrong about Beckham,' he told an interviewer. 'He is a worker of the old school. Apart from that ability to strike a ball that he has, he is the first to press when the opposition has the ball . . . This boy does not stand out as a seller of clothes. He stands out as a footballer . . . This boy is committing himself unconditionally and with extraordinary effort to the team . . . buying him has been a brilliant move for Real Madrid.'

No one in Spain would disagree, even if they dared, with the grand old man of Spanish football. What Beckham has achieved in these last six months has been, to repeat the most over-used word in Spain when talking about him, extraordinary.

Certainly, there are other achievements by other British sportsmen that deserve high praise, notably the England rugby team.

But in terms of solitary feats - for while he plays a team game the courage and talent and personality he has shown have been his own - what Beckham has done at Real Madrid ranks among the great sporting achievements in recent memory.

As he himself summed it up in an interview just before Christmas, simply but with great force: 'I am in the best team in the world and I have shown that I know how to play football.' Roberto Carlos went further in an interview in Sao Paulo last week. 'If Beckham continues playing like this he will soon be the best player in the world.'

Of course, it is quite possible that Real Madrid will win nothing this season, and certainly Beckham can expect some disappointments in Madrid in the coming months.

But what he has already achieved, in the face of such tough odds, and so much scepticism, is a remarkable individual achievement.

And once again, as has always tended to be the case with Beckham, great theatre.

We saw it in all its glory at the end of Real Madrid's last game of 2003 at the Bernabeu, a 2-1 win over title- chasing rival Deportivo. The game had just ended and he headed towards Lionel Scaloni, a Deportivo player with whom he had been having a bit of a running battle, a couple of yellow cards included, in the last minutes of the game.

Knowing full well that the eyes of the stadium's 80,000 fans were on him, he squared up to Solari, chest to chest. And then, just when things threatened to get nasty, with masterly composure he turned away, looked up at the fans massed around the mighty stadium and raised his hands in grateful applause.

The Bernabeu loved it and repaid the compliment with fullvoiced tribute to a man who has played all season for Real as if winning were a matter of life and death. As he headed down towards the tunnel the chant 'Beckham! Beckham! Beckham!' rung around the ground.

It was David Beckham's great moment of glory, an ovation as heartfelt as any he has received. It was the moment he understood, if he had not before, that they love him more at Real Madrid than they ever did at Manchester United.