Whether on the pitch or on screen, Greaves was always in different class
> Striker was ruthless in front of goal but was a man without ego who went on to become a TV star after battling demons
Ahead of yesterday’s game between the two clubs with whom he made his name, there was a minute’s applause in recognition of Jimmy Greaves. A whole team’s worth of former Tottenham greats, from Glenn Hoddle and Ossie Ardiles to Ledley King and Martin Chivers, lined up on the touchline to pay their respects.
On the giant screen as the stadium applauded was a picture of the great man in a Spurs shirt. A slight smile was playing across his lips; he appeared to be thinking about what he might do on this perfect pitch instead of the mudbaths he played on, with a ball as light as this at his feet instead of the dead weight of his day. The fact is, he would surely have run riot.
And how Tottenham could have used him as they laboured against Chelsea. Especially with Harry Kane – Greaves’s successor in the white shirt of club and country – playing so deep he required an aqualung. If nothing else, Greaves would certainly have made Chelsea’s accomplished defenders, having as easy an afternoon as they have experienced this season, think. Because, as Chivers put it when he was interviewed at half-time, this was a master of the goalscoring craft.
“He would find space where no one else would,” said Chivers, who played alongside Greaves at White Hart Lane for two years. “He was like a magnet, the ball invariably found him in the area.”
“Goalscoring is the hardest thing in football,” added Gary Mabbutt, standing alongside Chivers. “He made it look easy.”
Mabbutt was right: finishers do not come more efficient than Greaves. The statistics may have been much used since his passing, but they are worth repeating. He scored 44 goals in 57 internationals, 266 times in 379 appearances for Tottenham and remains the top division’s leading scorer 50 years on from his retirement. Blessed with preternatural balance, explosive pace and the sharpest of spatial awareness, he always occupied the right place at the right time. As Chivers said, he had so much time in the area he could tap the ball into the net where others were required to blast it.
And if his team-mates had not supplied him with a goalscoring opportunity, he was more than capable of creating his own. Playing on the Tottenham stadium screen as Chivers spoke was footage of Greaves drifting past entire defences as if they were not there. His skill was of a dimension that would be hugely coveted still. As Ian Wright put it in a valedictory tweet, his technique remains the one most worth copying for any contemporary striker. “The first footballer’s name I ever heard from my teacher,” Wright wrote. “‘No Ian! Finish like Jimmy Greaves’.”
Sadly, most of those applauding loud and long at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium were born way too late to have been blessed by seeing Greaves in live action. For many of those there, he was something else: an avuncular television personality, co-host of Saint and Greavsie, the finest football programme of all time. Together with his straight man Ian St John, every Saturday lunchtime for seven years he delivered a magnificent off-the-cuff role. Relaxed, never taking himself too seriously, he made the millions watching him feel as if he was chatting alongside them on the sofa.
Many chortling as the bloke with the grey moustache and the lively knitwear riffed on the week’s footballing events had no idea of his colossal abilities as a player. And the thing was, he would have been the last person to enlighten them.
Those who worked with him in his broadcasting peak recall someone invariably solicitous of others’ well-being, charming and very, very funny. What they do not recall was him ever talking about himself. Unless it was in self-mockery.
He was a man without apparent ego. A brilliant anecdotalist, capable of bringing any house down with his yarns, he never bigged up his abilities. The press lounge at Tottenham before kick-off resounded with stories from those who had ghosted columns for him, recalling how he would be so funny, tears would dampen their notebooks as they wrote down what he said. Though occasionally there was a need to remind him they were supposed to be writing for a family audience. So when, in the Nineties, David Baddiel and Frank Skinner chose to mock him on their Fantasy Football League as an out-of-touch representative of the past, those who had encountered Greaves realised the pair could never have met the man. Because if they had, he would undoubtedly have gifted them some funnier jokes.
There was a reason why those who came to love him on the telly were not entirely aware of the player he had once been. He had a lengthy gap in his life; as he once told an interviewer, he had “missed the Seventies”. He disappeared from public view for a whole decade, lost at the bottom of a bottle. In many ways, that was the third remarkable distinction of his life: the manner in which he countered his addiction. Typically, there was no noisy boasting of triumph. He admitted every day remained a struggle not to fall back into its grip. His realism and openness became an exemplar for thousands facing similar demons.
When he was able to return to the public gaze, it was a different side of Greaves we saw. On the pitch, he was as ruthless a finisher as ever put the ball into the net; lynx-eyed, cold-blooded. But on the screen – or on the stage doing a one-man show, or delivering an unfailingly hilarious after-dinner turn – he was warm, charming, forever seeking a laugh. He was our mate.
For the last six years of his life, since a stroke corralled him in a way no defender ever could, he was sadly constricted and lived away from any sort of attention. But for at least two generations of football fans, he remains the most accomplished practitioner of his art. Finisher, television star or Tottenham hero: his death is a reminder that nobody could match Jimmy Greaves.