Glenn Hoddle has the rare quality that, when he talks, nobody listens. Pretty much everything he says is open to ridicule, with the assertion that Michael Owen is not a natural goalscorer top of the list. Yet when he suggested that Andy Cole needed five chances to score a goal, the football world took the word of Hod as gospel.

There are much more incontrovertible statistics by which Cole should be judged. In the history of the Premiership, only Alan Shearer has scored more goals (260 to Cole's 187). Even more tellingly for a player whose approach play never got any credit, never mind as much as it deserved, only Ryan Giggs and Dennis Bergkamp have more assists from open play than Cole's 127. And if you exclude penalties (Shearer 56, Cole 1), Cole's goals-per-Premiership-games ratio is actually higher than Shearer's. Longevity and outstanding service from Giggs and co can qualify these statistics, but they cannot discredit them.

Cole won three league titles in as many seasons, including a Treble. For 12 months, he was part of the best strike partnership in Europe. He scored the winning goals in the 1999 Premiership and the 2002 League Cup (the latter, deliciously, at Hoddle's expense). His departure coincided with the end of Manchester United's hegemony. Now, in his dotage, he is still a genuine threat. Of England's celebrated mid-90s crop of strikers, Cole is the last man standing on the shoulder of defenders. But always - always - he will be the one who needed five chances to score a goal.

It is an unfair slur on a player who, while palpably never a true great like Shearer, deserves to sit snugly among the ranks of the very good. His overall goals-to-chances ratio, while short of that of Shearer and Owen, is well above industry standard. Hoddle's appraisal missed the point completely. It was never the quantity of Cole's misses that was his problem, but the quality. When he missed, they were either comic gems (Finland 2001), at a seminal moment (the title decider at West Ham in 1995), or both (Real Madrid 2000), and because of that they were burned in the memory, erroneously perceived as the norm.

Cole was a confidence player and, when it went, he could be absolutely awful: you could almost see him having a brain and body melt on the pitch. In his first full season at Old Trafford, 1995-96, he was nothing short of embarrassing, crushed by insecurity, the teething problems of a dramatic change in his footballing identity - United bought a goalscorer and made him into a footballer - and, most of all, the obvious contempt shown him by Old Trafford main's man, Eric Cantona. Against Liverpool at Wembley, he came dangerously close to becoming the first player to have a nervous breakdown during an FA Cup final.

But for all the occasional shockers, his mode, mean and median performances were of a very high order, and he overcame the demons and the doubters to become the most rounded striker of his generation: the only one who could lead the line, link play and run in behind. Cole arguably blazed a trail for the modern Premiership frontman. At the time when the specialist striker was in vogue, Sir Alex Ferguson had the vision to realise that it was more productive to have a jack of all trades than a master of one. Now, that multi-faceted, perpetual motion striker is the norm at the very top clubs: Didier Drogba, Louis Saha, Thierry Henry and, to a lesser extent, Dirk Kuyt. The specialist goalscorer, like Owen or Andy Johnson, is the preserve of the second-tier side.

Cole wears numerous badges of honour that go unseen. Few strikers have reinvented themselves as successfully. Few have had the mental strength to overcome such misfortune (in 1996 he suffered pneumonia - in the summer - and then, when he was recovering in the reserves, had both legs broken in one hit from Neil Ruddock), or such relentless, savage abuse from the public and the media, and speculation about their future. In October 1997, for example, Cole responded to morning headlines that he was to be replaced by Marcelo Salas by lashing a first-half hat-trick.

Few formed as many outstanding partnerships: whereas Shearer, in his later years, and Owen couldn't gel with anybody, Cole was part of, at a conservative estimate, three massively successful pairings with Peter Beardsley, Dwight Yorke and Darius Vassell. He even dovetailed very successfully with Teddy Sheringham, particularly in 2000-01, even though the pair were not on speaking terms.

Few had such range to their goalscoring: delicate chips, overhead kicks (three before Christmas in the 1999-00 season alone), solo efforts, headers, head down and lash it, head up and place it. Few worked as hard and unselfishly, and few maintained the respect of United fans after moving to Manchester City. A legend like Peter Schmeichel couldn't manage it; Cole could.

Most of all, he could play. No English striker has moved off the ball as effectively since Gary Lineker, and none as aggressively and relentlessly; Cole ran defenders into the ground, spinning in behind, fronting up to receive possession, twisting blood and frazzling minds. Marcel Desailly once called Cole one of the hardest opponents he had faced, chiefly because of his movement. And the subtlety of his link play was grossly underrated. Two assists in particular stand out: a half-volleyed, outside-of-the-foot lob for Ryan Giggs against Aston Villa in 1997, and a wonderfully precise, dipping cross for Yorke to equalise in Juventus in 1999.

That game, when United came from 2-0 down in Turin to win 3-2 and reach the European Cup final, was Cole's zenith. He and Yorke made Juventus, the high priests of catenaccio, doubt their faith by giving them the biggest chasing (and chastening) of their lives. Hardened defenders like Ciro Ferrara and Paolo Montero just couldn't cope. For that season, Cole and Yorke were the hottest ticket in European football. Their exquisite, knife-through-butter goal in Barcelona had even the opposing manager Louis van Gaal, modern football's biggest romantic, swooning.

The Champions League was and is of a higher standard than international football, yet Cole struggled badly with England. The notion that he was not good enough is irreconcilable with those performances in Juventus and Barcelona in particular. Uniquely, Cole's first four caps came under different managers, fostering a sense of alienation that never went away. Nor was he helped by a succession of roadblocks called Shearer, Owen, Sheringham, Fowler, Ferdinand and Wright - all masters of one trade, but none a jack of all of them.

Cole, more than most, needed to belong, and when he eventually got a decent run with England in 2000-01, there was too much water under the bridge for him to succeed. Even then, it was little short of farcical that Sven-Goran Eriksson, who called Cole a "great international football player" after his first game in charge, was bullied by public opinion into replacing Cole with Emile Heskey.

By then he was a figure of ridicule, a process in which he did not always help himself. He can be surly - United are the only club at which he has truly settled - and his decision to release a abominably bad rap record in 1999, 'Outstanding', simply made him stand out to his detractors even more. His time at Old Trafford coincided with the peak of ABU (Anyone But United) culture, a movement whose credibility should have been shattered by, among other things, the haranguing of David Beckham and the pathetically ill-judged chant that "if Gary Neville can play for England, so can I". Yet nobody questioned the verdict on Cole.

"My record speaks for itself," he says, "and when I have finished it will all be down there in black and white for people to see." For the majority, alas, those objective statistics will never override Hoddle's subjective appraisal.