Blue-eyed boy

WHEN a 17-year-old striker called Jimmy Greaves made his professional debut for Chelsea in August 1957, the thought of the London club shaking the foundations of the game to the very core would have been unthinkable.

The club Greaves began his career with was under the old school management of former Arsenal hero Ted Drake, still the only man to have delivered a League championship to Stamford Bridge but one whose pre-match team-talks only stretched as far as an 'All the best'.

Throughout his stay, Greaves said Drake and chairman Joe Mears were always pleading poverty and the fledgling forward doubled up in his early days as the club's office boy.

Forty-six years on and even the office boys at Chelsea are making the headlines. Peter Kenyon's appointment as chief executive from the clutches of Manchester United last week was the latest shock in a summer of frenzied activity sparked by the millions of new owner Roman Abramovich.

The next chapter of the story began last night when Abramovich's expensively constructed dream team started their Champions League campaign against Sparta Prague in the Czech capital.

To a former Chelsea boy like Greaves, now 63, the Roman conquest of Europe is an intriguing, and amusing, experiment.

"They've set the game alight," Greaves said in his inimitable Essex drawl at the weekend, during a visit to Dublin.

"I don't know how it's going to end up, none of us do, but that's part of the excitement," before a broad beam breaks out, his cheeks rise to intensify the sparkle in his eyes and leave him looking like the archetypal Cheshire Cat.

"Everyone's now waiting to see what happens and if you support Chelsea you're obviously waiting to pick up the trophies. If you don't support them then you're waiting for a good laugh, aren't you?"

He may have left Stamford Bridge in 1961 for a ground-breaking if short-lived move to AC Milan but Greaves' heart is firmly with the former.

"Chelsea should really get through to the second phase, all three English clubs should, and that's when it really starts. But it would be great to see the old club win it, it really would, it would be great.

"English clubs have always got a fair shout, no question. But it's a tournament that goes on across a whole season and if you think AC Milan, my old club, finished up champions this year having only qualified in a preliminary round on an away goal, then you have to think to yourself that it's an open tournament."

The make-up of the competition, with two group phases, should help a hastily assembled Chelsea side settle down in the Champions League, Greaves believes, more successfully than in the Premiership.

"A lot of people would say, 'well, you're buying success' but you can't buy success. It doesn't matter how many players you get, you've still gotta work hard at it.

"You can't just throw a load of money at it. It's easier to throw a load of players together who are all talented but you still have to make it work.

"In Chelsea's case, it's quite possible that they could fare better in the Champions League than in the Premiership this season. I think in some ways winning the Champions League can be easier than winning the Premiership."

That Chelsea have got to this position at all is, according to Greaves, to the credit of maverick club chairman Ken Bates.

"He's brilliant, done a great job, I've always been a great fan and no one can understand why! But if Ken hadn't come along, there wouldn't have been a Stamford Bridge today. I know he's not everybody's cup of tea but he's done a fantastic job at Chelsea.

"And this last little episode is a masterstroke. How can you find a Russian with 200 million quid. How many people can go out and find somebody from Azerbaijan or wherever where you'd think there wasn't 200 million (pounds) in the whole country but there's one guy and Ken finds him and STILL finishes up chairman for a couple of years or so. It's a masterstroke."

The publication of Greavsie: The Autobiography couldn't be timelier. As much a social history of English and European football during the glory days of the 1950s and 1960s as well as an honest telling of a remarkable professional and sometimes intensely painful personal life, the book does not just invite comparisons with the modern game and the people that populate it.

It demands them.

Think of an aspect of football today and Greaves will have invariably been the first one to have been there, done it and sold the merchandise.

Want a 17-year-old sensation? Greaves was it, finishing his first season with Chelsea in 1957-58 as the Football League's leading scorer.

Yearn for a high-profile move to a foreign giant? Jimmy's your man. He was one of the first to move to Serie A when Italian football lifted its embargo on foreign players in 1961 in an £80,000 transfer from Chelsea to AC Milan.

Fancy a lucrative advertising campaign? See JG he was the face of Bovril hot drinks adorning Wembley programmes and newspaper ads in 1959.

Quite simply, Greaves was a phenomenon on the pitch and a ground-breaker off it.

Between 1957 and 1971 he found the net 491 times, his goalscoring record is still second to none 100 league goals before he was 21, 200 by the time he was 23, six times the first division's leading scorers and never out of the top five, 44 goals in 57 appearances for England, and a scorer on his debut for every senior team he played for.

In Europe, with Tottenham he made history, too, with Spurs' Cup Winners' Cup final win over Atletico Madrid in 1962-63 bringing a European trophy to British soil for the first time.

The season before, Greaves' first at White Hart Lane, he featured in Tottenham's European Cup campaign. Spurs lost the semi-final 4-3 on aggregate to Benfica but in his book Greaves looks to three dubiously disallowed goals and an ignored penalty appeal for a blatant handball and wonders what might have been.

It proved to be his only sniff of European club football's greatest prize.

Nowadays he finds the current format of the competition a little too predictable.

"I preferred it when it was the European Cup. It was a lot harder to win, a straight knockout competition you got two bites, home and away and that was it. But you can't argue with what they're doing now there so much money involved that they won't go back the old format; they'd be stupid if they did the loss of revenue would be enormous.

"It's a modern world, it's a different world to the one I played in and in a lot of ways it's better. But in a lot of ways it's not as romantic."

There was not much romance to be found, either, when Greaves' career came to an end at the relatively young age of 31 in 1971. Greaves is at pains in the book to point out his omission for England's World Cup-winning team in 1966, when he was unable to dislodge Hurst having picked up a nasty injury in a group game, was not the starting point of his alcoholism.

It was more to do with his ill-conceived move from Spurs to his local club West Ham in 1970, and a feeling his footballing powers were on the wane. He had joined a struggling team, albeit possessing the likes of Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst and Billy Bonds, and was prone to bouts of depression.

Like many footballers with time on their hands and money in their pockets, Greaves sought solace in a bottle and it cost him a longer playing career, his marriage, his home and his considerable business interests.

He admits the 1970s are a lost decade to him but a favourite phrase is 'out of darkness cometh light' and in typical, trail-blazing style, he pre-empted the likes of Paul Merson and Tony Adams by coming clean about his drink dependency.

He announced his alcoholism to a startled British public on the prime-time chat show Russell Harty Plus and his honesty in front of the cameras prompted a TV documentary about him in 1979. That in turn led to an invitation from ATV in Birmingham to apply his new-found skills in a footballing context and proved to be the start of a successful television career that lasted 18 years longer, in fact, than his footballing one.

"Yeah," he sighs, taking a long drag on an even longer cigarette, "out of all adversity It was a difficult programme to make but you've got so many people now, in government and everywhere, who are busy running round denying everything and it's just creating more problems, for themselves and everybody else. I just thought, well, I am what I am, let's just stand up and be counted and do it and that was it really. Then people knew the situation.

"I didn't now what to say but 25 years on I can talk to people with a great deal of knowledge on the subject and in total comfort.

"The thing that comes from it all, though, and from all that's gone on over the last 25 years, is that if you're convinced I your mind that you did the right thing and I am and if you don't worry about it, which I don't because I was born with a defect and I talk openly about it, then I've found people have been very kind to me and I don't get a negative response."

A straightforward, honest approach, then, much like his autobiography and, returning to football, one that has meant very few regrets.

Of all his old clubs, he admits a soft spot for them all. Even AC Milan.

"Oh yes," Greaves said emphatically. "I know I didn't have a very happy time there but I still went out and played for them and I was still successful, scored a lot of goals for them in that short period.

"Oh no, they're still my club and I was chuffed and thrilled to see them win (the Champions League), delighted, to see the old shirt and the badge lovely.

In another time and another place it could have all been different."

Greavsie: The Autobiography is published by Time Warner, £18.99stg.