FLASHBACK TO Athens and the Champions League final last May. AC Milan have just won their eighth European crown and Pippo Inzaghi is the man of the hour, having scored both goals in the final. Most of the players have retreated to the centre circle to celebrate.

Inzaghi lingers by himself in the penalty box. He spots Massimo Ambrosini jogging back up the pitch with the match ball and waves his arms frantically. Ambrosini hits a 30-yard pass in Inzaghi's direction. Super Pippo takes off, limbs pumping furiously. Nobody is near him, no opponents, no team-mates and, of course, no goalkeeper. He meets the ball just outside the six yard box and sidefoots it just past the far post. Ambrosini shakes his head.

After the game, the midfielder would say of Inzaghi's post-final whistle miss: "I don't know what's more unusual. The fact that he insisted on trying to shoot the ball into an empty goal from five metres out or the fact that he missed. But that's Pippo."

Indeed, the above anecdote sums up both sides of the Inzaghi coin. The visceral need to score, even at the most absurd times - like, say, minutes after winning the biggest prize in club football - and the capacity for spectacular misses.

Which, in some ways, is rather unfair. The Milan striker, who visits Celtic Park on Wednesday, is something of a contradiction. He's neither physically strong nor particularly technically gifted. His one physical gift - quickness - tends to stand out, but largely because the other facets of his athletic ability are so pedestrian.

Indeed, Inzaghi is not especially fast either. When the club did their pre-season fitness tests, he turned out to be slower over 40 metres than all but one other striker or defender, including 39-year-old Paolo Maldini, 36-year-old Serginho and 37-year-old Cafu.

And that may explain why some of the finest minds in the game have consistently rubbished his contributions. Sir Alex Ferguson famously said that "he was born offside". Johan Cruyff went even further: "Look, the thing about Inzaghi is that he can't actually play football at all. He is just always in the right position."

If that's the case, then perhaps no player in the history of the game has maximised his limited skills as well as Inzaghi. Just look at the numbers.

No current player has scored more goals in European club competition than Inzaghi. Indeed, he needs another nine to join Gerd Muller at the top of the all-time list. He has tallied more than 200 goals in Serie A, Coppa Italia and European competition and it's safe to say this total would be higher if he had not been slowed by injuries over the past four seasons - since 2003 he averaged a paltry 14 Serie A starts a year for Milan. He has 25 goals and 57 caps for Italy, despite being part of a golden generation of Italian strikers which includes the likes of Christian Vieri, Francesco Totti and Alessandro Del Piero.

And yet when you watch him play, especially in person, something doesn't look quite right. Part of it is his build. Thin and spindly, with limbs that seemingly move independently of the rest of his body, he just doesn't look like a modern professional footballer. He looks more like the runt of the litter.

His movements on the pitch reflect this. Where great players make difficult things look easy, he does the opposite. His actions are exaggerated and, often uncoordinated, as if he just barely manages to keep things together. Not coincidentally, the commentator for Milan Channel - the club's official TV station - who has a nickname for each player, calls him "High Anxiety", after the Mel Brooks film.

He looks like a hyperactive 12-year-old who hasn't taken his Ritalin. While he has mellowed compared to years past - thanks, in part, to yoga - he remains a bundle of nervous energy.

For a long-time, Inzaghi was under-appreciated in Italy and, in many ways, he still is. When he joined Juventus in 1997 to team up with Del Piero and Zinedine Zidane in a memorable front three, many saw it as heresy, like forcing Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton to perform with a pimply teenager who just got his guitar out of the box. Yet, 87 goals in all competitions in four years tell their own story.

Still, when Juventus signed David Trezeguet in 2000, it became clear that Inzaghi, for all his goals, was surplus to requirement. Thus came his move to Milan, a shift greeted with scepticism at first. Again, he did not seem to fit the Rossoneri brand and the fact he came from Juventus meant he had to win over the fans. He promptly did, especially in his second year, when he notched 30 goals in all competitions and was the Champions League top scorer.

He still doesn't really fit into Milan's ethos and their silky, short-passing game which demands technique, creativity and selflessness. Inzaghi's selflessness manifests itself in his continuous, and often thankless, runs into space - the problem, as one Serie A commentator put it, is that: "Inzaghi may work hard to get open, but, when he does, you know if you give him the ball, you won't get it back: he'll either score, blast it into the stands or lose it."

But then, you always return to the numbers. Not only does he score often, he scores in big matches. Perhaps the people we should be celebrating are guys like him, rather than the Kakas and Ronaldinhos of this world. As great as those guys are, they were born with tremendous athletic and technical gifts. Inzaghi wasn't. He is one of us, the masses who are neither fast, nor strong, nor skillful nor athletic. His success comes through hard work and the ability to learn where the ball is going to be and to make sure he's there to meet it.

The father of a young footballer most likely can't, in good conscience, tell him one day he'll grow up to be like Ronaldinho. But he can tell him that, with enough character, workrate and single-mindedness, one day he can be like Inzaghi. Which is no bad thing.