Pizarro's miracle is all down to Healing Hans

It's why the world's top sportsmen and women have flocked to his Munich clinic for a generation. Bayern's advantage is that, as their chief medical officer, they have immediate and unrivalled access to the man general manager Uli Hoeness swears must be the best medicine man in world sport.

If not the best, then surely the most controversial. In the early days, those tales of him injecting willing sportsmen with strange homeopathic cocktails, famously featuring cell parts from calves' foetuses, pig blood and cockerel heads, to speed up the healing process, always did make him

sound a bit like some Frankenstein figure.

He always had opponents. Athletics' top medic, professor Arne Ljungqvist, used to warn that Muller-Wohlfahrt's fondness for these injections, which former Bayern striker Alan McInally reckoned often made him feel like a "pin cushion", might end up breaking down patients' immune systems.

Yet who can deny his results have been amazing? He turned pain-racked Jose-Maria Olazabal from near-cripple into Masters champ in two years; he resurrected Paula Radcliffe's career with a course of tablets including extracts of salmon; as doctor to Germany's football team, too, he got Jurgen Klinsmann fit for the Euro 96 final after a serious calf injury.

"Other doctors are jealous of him here because he's so successful and famous," one of Muller-Wohlfahrt's patients explained down at the training ground. "Yet he is a good guy who really cares about his patients and who works until 9pm most nights just to make sure he sees everyone."

Maradona, Jimmy Connors, Boris Becker, Steffi Graf, Maurice Greene, Katarina Witt . . . like hundreds of other sporting luminaries, they swear by him. His client list is both international and astounding. It even includes Pavarotti, though, apparently, Muller-Wohlfahrt hasn't done much for the big fella's football career.

The English, more than most, have looked towards him. Cricketer Alex Tudor met footballer Jamie Redknapp in Muller-Wohlfahrt's waiting room. Greg Rusedski was here, too. The British athletics team ought to have installed a portable cabin outside his practice.

Now, ironically, even Chelsea, under the former UK track and field team doctor Bryan English, have been following his lead in the controversial healing practice of 'blood spinning', which entails the removal, cleansing and reinjection of blood around damaged tissue.

Forget blood spinning; the fans here just want him to help get their blood racing again, as in their Champions League-winning 2001 season.

For the semi-final, Muller-Wohlfahrt somehow managed to get Giovane Elber fit to score a brilliant winner at Real Madrid just 12 days after the striker had undergone surgery on his knee.

Tonight, instead of Brazilian Elber, read the Peruvian Pizarro. The miracle doc still gives them all hope here.