Greats brought to book by Giles
Not that I was surprised Messi was in the running, you understand, even if, the following night at the Nou Camp, Neil Lennon’s battlers would do a better job than most at cramping his style. It was just that it seemed a little unusual to find someone of Bonner’s comparatively mature years being so unequivocal about elevating the current game’s outstanding personality above the mighty claims of all the giants of yesteryear, from Stanley Matthews through Pele to Zidane.
John Giles would also have Messi there or thereabouts but, when it comes to the crunch, he reserves the ultimate accolade for Bobby Charlton. And, in its own way, that’s a surprising choice too. Again, not because the brilliant Charlton doesn’t deserve a nomination but because the conventional wisdom, refined over years of intense debate, is that you can’t look beyond the fab four of Pele, Maradona, George Best and Johann Cruyff to locate the greatest of the great. But Giles does and, when thinking outside the box — and that means literally as well as metaphorically — he also comes up with a startling candidate for the role of Pete Best: Nottingham Forest’s John Robertson.
Now there, for sure, is a talking point, but then Giles’s new book The Great & The Good (Hachette Books), in which he offers his opinions on “the legendary players, managers and teams of 50 football years” is full of such original and stimulating thought, supported by in-depth and often first-hand knowledge, piercing insight, enlightening anecdote and all those other qualities we’ve come to expect from a first-rate player turned first-rate pundit.
It would be pushing things a bit to suggest that Giles is infallible but, when it comes to the final word on football, his is probably as close as we’re going to get to a Supreme Court judgement.
For example, try beating this as a pithy definition of what Giles calls a master player: “Above all there is this: after their first touch they have more time and space than they had before they touched it.”
Or this for a handy culinary distinction between the great and the greatest: “At Tottenham you could say that Jimmy Greaves was the icing on the cake, but Dave Mackay was the cake… When Alex Ferguson signed Eric Cantona, he was all icing, Roy Keane was the cake. And Keane would have been the cake in any other team, but Cantona would not necessarily have been the icing in another team. George Best was probably the icing — but very good icing — on a cake made by Bobby Charlton and Nobby Stiles.”
The book is full of such nourishing food for thought, much of it based on Giles’s own experience of pitting his wits against top talent in the heat of battle. Here he is on the imperious Franz Beckenbauer: “Like all great players, on the field he gave you two choices when you came up against him — a bad choice and a terrible choice. The rest was up to you.”
Giles holds the highest regard not for those of supreme talent but for those who make the most of that rare gift. This is where Best (“Maybe the most talented player I have ever come across”) falls short in his eyes, with the author’s well-known aversion to anything which smacks of showbiz in football never too far from the surface.
Not that such unease prevents him from telling with relish some fantastically entertaining yarns about the great entertainers, including one about Scotland’s ‘Slim’ Jim Baxter, a man who once indulged in a spot of taunting ‘keepy-uppy’ during a game against England and of whom Giles memorably remarks: “There is no doubt that Jim Baxter was an absolutely brilliant player and equally no doubt that he was a complete headbanger.”
Exhibit A: Giles recalls how his old Leeds boss Don Revie had once considered signing Baxter but, before sealing the deal, thought it wise to confront the player face to face with his reputation for extra-curricular activities — “drinking, not training properly and generally messing about”. Having placed the list of misdemeanours before Baxter at his home in Fife, Revie asked him what he had to say for himself. “That’s a big list, Don, a very big list,” agreed Jim. “But there’s a few f***ing things even you haven’t got in there”. And so Jim Baxter went to Rangers instead.
And what of another great Scot, the aforementioned John Robertson? Giles posits that he belongs to a unique category — a great player never acknowledged as such. “Indeed, when I have mentioned him alongside the likes of Pele and Cruyff,” he concedes, “people have assumed that I must have made a mistake and have corrected me for it.”
Certainly, in my own estimation, I would have always placed Robertson — the gifted winger of Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest — maybe a little ahead of, let’s say, Chelsea’s Charlie Cooke but some way short of Celtic’s unstoppable Jimmy Johnstone. But where I saw a game-changing winger, Giles saw something rather more profound: a winger who could dictate a game.
“Robertson had such a brilliant positional sense,” he writes, “he could get into positions on the left wing that made him seem like a magnet for the ball. And when he received it, he was able to use it in the way that a great midfield player would, so that he controlled the game from the wing instead of the middle of the field. I have never seen anyone else do that before or since.”
Which is why a great footballer earns his place in what is, unarguably, a great football book.
* liammackey@hotmail.com
