Best

Considering how relatively few — relative to a truly committed fan (my excuse being that I’m a Middlesbrough fan) — football matches I’ve been to in my time, an oddly large number of them have had a significance beyond their immediate competitive stake. I was at the game at Wembley on a chilly night (though Wembley always seemed to be chilly — hideous bleak hanger of a ground that it was) in November 1981 when England qualified for the World Cup for the first time in 20 years, having participated as hosts in 1966 and qualified by default as champions in 1970. I was at the League Cup semi-final between Arsenal and Tottenham in 1987 whose significance — beyond being a cracking game, and a personal disaster for the Tottenham-loving friend I went with, when Arsenal scored twice in the last few minutes to come from behind and silence the home crowd completely — only grew much later, when I read Fever Pitch and discovered that the game constituted a turning poing in both the book and the personal life of Nick Hornby, Arsenal’s last-gasp triumph kick-starting a re-evaluation and a new beginning of his life. (And, hey, through a long chain of showbiz bastardisation, resulting in some work for Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore.)

In September 1981 — I hadn’t remembered it as being so close to the World Cup game — I was also at Middlesbrough goalkeeper Jim Platt’s testmonial game at Ayresome Park, along with about seven-and-a-half-thousand others, though I remember the place as being far more packed than that. Years of filling Panini sticker albums have etched the long-gone Ayresome’s crowd capacity of 42,000 into my brain, and I can’t believe it was less than a fifth full that day.

Much as it was Platt’s game, the show belonged to someone else. A mercenary gunslinger hired in the closing time of his career to provide a bit of effortless class for the Sunderland opposition: George Best. It didn’t seem feasible that the man on the pitch could be the same one who’d worn those over-long sleeves in the blood-red strip. That was a different age: of floodlit European glory, Law and Charlton and Eusebio. He still had it, though, and an end-of-empire greatness still hung around his shoulders. He strode around the centre of the pitch, distorting space-time so that everything seemed to begin and end at his feet. As a kid, the footballers I admired were those who span greatness from meagre resources by means of effort, determination, application. Perhaps that’s how I wanted to see myself, because as a player I certainly had the meagre resources part. But there was simply nothing to do in the face of Best’s class but admire, and remember that you were there. It was one of his last games in Britain. Afterwards, Middlesbrough tried to sign him for a last, quick hit, but his heart was long gone. His body followed it today.