The Magnificent Sevens. Frank Worrall
the wrong pair of glasses, but he would never forgive the Doc. My psychoanalyst friend tells me that ‘at times of complete breakdown – rock bottom – addicts will sometimes find a way to free themselves of their demons. Alcoholics will go to AA, drug users to NA; it is a window for release, brought about by the complete hopelessness of one’s situation.’
Fair enough, so if George hit rock bottom during his life, surely the first occasion would have been around the time of January 1974? But his despair was not enough to ‘save him’. ‘Some people have such a strong ego, such a strong, overblown sense of self-pride, that they will not try to find a way out,’ says my friend. ‘They do not think there is anything that wrong with their life – their illness, whether it be alcoholism, drug abuse or co-dependence, is so powerful that it keeps them in a state of denial.’
And so it proved with George. He left United to spend more time trying to fill the aching hole inside him with purely hedonistic solutions – more women, more drink, more highs. His career as a serious work of art was over; post-’74, he became a rolling, drunken mercenary of a footballer, parading his fading talents to the highest bidder, whether that be in Scotland, America or the lower leagues. It was a criminal waste of his talent.
There followed spells with Stockport County, Fulham, Hibernian, Los Angeles Aztecs and San Jose Earthquakes, before George finally retired from the game in 1983 after a brief stint with Bournemouth. Brian Glanville summed it all up like this: ‘He had prematurely retired, and when he returned to play for Fulham and in Los Angeles, his girth had increased, the dynamic acceleration had gone and the game was deprived of his marvellous virtuosity.’
Of course, there were also still moments of joy – as we have already mentioned, George would claim his goal for San Jose against Fort Lauderdale in 1981 was his finest ever. George was 35 by now, a little more rotund, a little slower, but the natural skill was still there. He took the ball from a team-mate in the centre circle and then took on a handful of Fort Lauderdale opponents. As he edged towards the box, another three defenders approached – he swerved around them as if they simply weren’t there and then lifted the ball over the hapless goalkeeper. Every time I see it, it reminds me of John Barnes’s goal for England in the Maracana in Brazil – only it is a better goal than even that piece of genius.
The pick of George’s lost years would probably be 1976 and 1977, when he joined Fulham. Brian Glanville says, ‘In late 1976, he went back to England [from America] and, along with Bobby Moore, turned out for Fulham, playing 42 games in two seasons and scoring eight goals. He was inevitably slower, but still skilful and adroit.’
Five years after he had left United, George Best would ask the club for a testimonial. They refused. The decision would create a chasm that would see George stay away from Old Trafford for the best part of two decades and increase his resentment at what he saw as the cold-shoulder treatment from the club. While I think Docherty was right to kick him out in 1974, I believe George had a strong case to be granted a testimonial in 1979 – and one can understand his bitterness.
He played for the club from September 1963, when he made his début, until 1 January 1974, when he turned out in his last match, the disappointing 3-0 Division One defeat by Queen’s Park Rangers at Loftus Road. It was a total of 11 years’ service, but the United board refused him a testimonial on the grounds that he had not played enough games in that timespan.
It was a ridiculously unfair decision; players are usually granted a testimonial after ten years of service, and George had given one more. Moreover, the club’s reasoning was hardly logical when you consider that Paddy Crerand had been given a testimonial – and yet had played 160 games fewer, and for only eight years, from 1962–70. George would eventually find allies back in Belfast who were willing to help him out – the Football Association of Northern Ireland.
In 1988, a testimonial match was held for him at Windsor Park, Belfast. Among the crowd were Sir Matt Busby and Bob Bishop, the scout who had discovered George, while those playing included Ossie Ardiles, Pat Jennings and Liam Brady. George scored twice, one goal from outside the box, the other from the penalty spot. With the help of the £72,000 raised by the testimonial match and dinner in Belfast, George was finally able to sort out a life that had been shattered by financial and emotional problems in the 14 years since he had quit United.
It was good of the Irish FA and the locals to treat him so warmly. He had not always had the interests of Northern Ireland at heart during his career – in fact, it would be the truth but a massive understatement to say that his career for his country never managed to achieve anything like the supreme class of the one he had for Manchester United. Without doubt, he was the greatest player to ever pull on the green shirt of Northern Ireland, but he would appear for them just 37 times, scoring 9 goals. The first of those caps arrived on 15 April 1964 when, aged 17, he played, along with Pat Jennings who was also making his début, in Northern Ireland’s 3-2 victory over Wales at Swansea. The last game was against the Dutch on 12 October 1977, when, aged 31, he played in the 1-0 defeat at Windsor Park.
Two highlights stand out for me in what was a generally undistinguished international career – the games against Scotland at Windsor Park in 1967 and against England in 1970. George tormented the Scottish defence in that British Home International Championship encounter in 1967, single-handedly destroying them with a dazzling display of skill and mischief and laying on the winning goal for Dave Clements. The brilliant Scottish defender Tommy Gemmell suffered a personal nightmare against George that day. He said, ‘George Best was the greatest player I ever faced and, drunk or sober, he could take you to the cleaners. Do I remember it [the match]? I’ll never forget it. If ever a defender was destroyed by an attacker it was [then] … The unfortunate defender was me, the attacker was George Best and the details are still seared on my mind after all those years. It was a muddy pitch but it would not have mattered what the state of the surface had been, the outcome would still have been the same, because the Belfast-born George Best – starring for one afternoon only in his native city – was simply tremendous.
‘I started the game at right-back and Bestie began on the left wing. He tore me apart. Inside, outside, I couldn’t even catch him to kick him.’
Then Georgie-boy had the audacity to take the mickey out of the great Gordon Banks in another Home International in May 1971, which England won 1-0. Banksie, the goalkeeper who had thwarted the great Pelé with that miraculous, low, right-handed save in the World Cup a year earlier, almost conceded a bizarre goal against George. The mischievous Georgie was lurking as Banks prepared to punt the ball upfield. The England keeper tossed the ball into the air and, as he draw his leg back, Best nipped in and lifted it into the air. As Banks looked around helplessly, Georgie nodded the ball into the goal. The referee disallowed it for foul play, but Banks would later admit he was lucky to get away with it.
That was the beauty of George Best. Reputations on the pitch meant nothing to him; he simply weaved his own magic, oblivious to rivals with world-class pedigrees who would try to stop him. More was the pity – given the isolated incidents of extraordinary skill and perception – that he never put his heart into playing for his country. It was as if he could not always raise his game because the standard of his team-mates did not match up to his own stratospheric levels, just as he had complained about turning out with a fading team at United in the early Seventies. On another level, his lack of commitment would cost him in terms of posterity, with some critics arguing that he could never be compared to, say, Pelé and Maradona because he had never cut it at international level.
At the time, with mounting problems in his life both in and outside football, his role in footballing history was one of the last things on George’s mind. He became one of the first people to have ‘Antabuse’ pellets sewn into the lining of his stomach – the drug that they contained – Disulfiram – was supposed to make him violently sick if he drank alcohol. But two separate attempts at the implant treatment, in Scandinavia and the USA, failed to stop him drinking and, by the mid-1980s, a bookmaker George knew offered him odds of 6-4 on making it to his 40th birthday.
The game for George had now become more about survival than establishing a permanent legacy. George’s sad decline was lived out in the full glare of publicity and, despite the best intentions of many