MICHAEL SCHUMACHER is the greatest sportsman who ever drew breath. Oh, no he’s not! Oh, yes he is! Oh, no he’s — well, maybe he is and maybe he isn’t, but the one sure thing is that we’ll miss him when he retires on Sunday.

We will miss him for his ability. We will miss him for his unslakeable ambition. We will miss him for his brilliance as a team leader. But above all we will miss him for his villainy. Over the years, Schumacher has established himself as one of the all-time great pantomime villains of sport.

Schumacher’s sporting legacy is a complex issue: huge talent compromised by an outrageous willingness to bend the rules, even to the extent of putting lives in danger. But what is not in doubt is his ability to play the role of villain, and in sport villains are almost as cherished as heroes.

Sport is not only a test of ability. It is also a succession of dramas and a complex cloth of interwoven narratives. Stories need heroes. Stories also need villains. And Schumacher has played the villain’s role to perfection, driving Damon Hill off the track in 1994 and getting away scot-free — no doubt giggling like Dick Dastardly’s sidekick, Muttley — doing the same with Jacques Villeneuve three years later and getting a token punishment; and this year, dramatically balking Fernando Alonso in qualifying for Monaco, in an incident demonstrating that Schumacher’s instinct for villainy has no more left him than his desire for victory.

All this has been exacerbated by Schumacher’s sneering contempt for his opponents and team-mates and his incontinent podium-prancing in victory. And, it must be said, his Germanness.

Schumacher invites us to add the Tabasco of xenophobia to the routine of villain-hissing. It recalls a time when the villains in Hollywood films always had German accents. (Now that we are no longer xenophobic, they always have English accents.) We will miss him when he is gone, as we have missed all the great pantomime villains of sport, for they have enriched our lives.

Not that Schumacher deliberately sought to be a villain — and, indeed, he is seen as a hero pure and simple in less exacting circles in Germany. But for us, he will remain a villain — half-genius, half-joke.

Some athletes play up to the part of villain with theatrical relish. A classic example is Dennis Lillee, the Australia fast bowler who terrorised — the word is not too extreme — England batsmen in the 1970s. He made himself a perfect Central Casting villain — the tousled hair, the evil moustache, the blazing eyes — and with it the naked relish in extorting fear.

Everything about him was theatrical — the glorious menace of the run-up, the explosive delivery stride, the follow-through and the blow-torch glare, the unbuttoned shirt, the crouching, screaming, hectoring appeal — with two index fingers raised — and the contemptuous way he dealt with an appeal’s rejection, flicking the sweat from his brow with a disdainful index finger.

Mike Brearley, the former England captain, wrote with a detachment and honesty rare in sporting reminiscence about a social occasion when he still found it hard to deal with the overwhelming Lillee persona. Lillee was cheerful, friendly, insisting that he was only “like that” on the pitch. But Brearley said that the performance had gone too deep.

There are other sportsmen who set themselves up as villains, but in the main they aren’t the real thing, merely cardboard ogres. Vinnie Jones, Robbie Savage: who are they compared with Jürgen Klinsmann or Diego Maradona?

Neither of these last two footballers sets himself up as a villain in the Lillee mode, but both excited much loathing in their time. Klinsmann had the advantage of being German and was an artful conner of referees. When he arrived in England to play for Tottenham Hotspur, he was unaware that he had almost cult status as — to strike an ornithological note — the great northern diver.

He managed to defuse much of the tension surrounding his arrival in England by means of something rarely seen in sport: self-mocking humour. After scoring his first goal for Tottenham, he performed a headlong dive and in a single, wet, grassy moment, slithered from hate-object to love-object.

Maradona has always been blood-brother to Schumacher; a genuine villain, a genuine genius. Naturally, the English appreciate the villainy more than most because it was against England in 1986 that he scored the Hand of God goal. Were we right to half-forgive him after that subsequent and brilliant run-and-score through the entire England defence, or did the miracle come about because, as one observer said at the time, England were like a man who had just had his wallet pinched?

John McEnroe was another who made the journey from hatred to love. He was the most wonderful tennis player, with a touch that even Roger Federer can only equal rather than better, and with the extraordinary ability to raise his game, raise his game and raise it yet again for the greatest of all challenges.

But God, those scenes. Those screaming tantrums, that demolition of the barley water, the swearing, the confrontations. It was not exciting to watch; it was horrible, deeply uncomfortable, a man in the grip of madness.

Of course, McEnroe should have been jumped on rather than indulged, but tennis, worried about box office, failed to give him the high-profile default until far too late in his life.

McEnroe was wonderful and ghastly, hated and admired, and just when you decided he was a great man after all, in came the next rage. It wasn’t a warrior’s defiance, it was all the passion of the teenager slamming the door on his wealthy parents.

But McEnroe also became a love-object. He has turned into a brilliant commentator — acerbic, cuddly, ironical and razor-sharp — and for two weeks of every year he becomes a cult hero of British life.

That is not a transition Ben Johnson managed to make. When Johnson tested positive for anabolic steroids after winning the 100 metres at the Olympic Games in Seoul in 1988, he became the greatest villain sport has seen. Not that his villainy was in itself exceptional — alas — but he was the one who was caught.

He had to pay the price, not only for the sins of others, but also for the shattered hopes and dreams of the world’s sporting audience. The world was betrayed by sport and it was through Johnson that we realised this with full force. So he had to be hated.

Johnson was the man who gave everything, and that was far too much. Sport has never been the same since that race 18 years back.

But let us close with one of the greatest villains of all. Brooding looks, a stare that was better than Lillee’s, a record of violence, an ability to quell opponents and referees with a single look from beneath the eyebrows, massive, implacable, the conscious extorter of respect by means of terror, by means of implacable force of his nature.

Yes, Martin Johnson, the man who captained England to victory in the rugby union World Cup of 2003. Villain to the world. Ah yes, but he was our villain. That’s almost better than a hero.

Johnson is the greatest rugby player of the past decade. Oh, yes he is!