A knight in all but name who was treated shoddily by establishment
Outpouring of love is genuine, but English football’s greatest goalscorer deserved more recognition when alive
Jimmy Greaves never did get the day out at Buckingham Palace in the way that he so richly deserved.
Yes, the most overdue gong in sport was finally announced in the 2021 New Year’s Honours list, but it would come some 50 years after English football’s greatest goalscorer had passed his peak and, even more tragically, more than five years after he had suffered a devastating stroke.
Greaves had been wheelchairbound since, trapped inside his body with limited speech, and the heartbreaking truth is that he had long felt ready to die.
The family had still very much wanted to get him along to the
Palace in some way but, even without all the restrictions of the Covid19 pandemic, the possibility of the day he had earned – sharing a cheeky joke perhaps with the Queen – had long since gone.
And so, amid an outpouring of genuine love and all the rightfully celebratory tributes, we might also ask why there was not rather more recognition when Greaves was alive. Even Harry Kane, behind Greaves by 53 years, 191 English topflight goals and four major trophies – including the small matter of a World Cup – got to the MBE first.
Greaves, like the rest of the 1966 squad, famously also had to wait 43 years even for a World Cup winner’s medal while the relentless promotion of Premier League records – as if football did not exist before 1992 – means that a generation of Match of the Day viewers could be forgiven for believing that Alan Shearer is England greatest top-flight goalscorer.
Even fewer will know that, up until 2017 and the arrival of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, Greaves was actually also the leading top-flight goalscorer across all of the big five European leagues.
A seeming airbrushing of history, as well as gestures that feel like too little too late, have become sadly familiar trends whenever the time comes to report on the passing of any great player from this era, especially the 1966 World Cup heroes. Greaves, more than most, might not have cared much for personal recognition, but it would be a mistake still to make that assumption.
He was a staunch royalist and his beloved wife, Irene, says that he shed a tear when she told him about the MBE earlier this year. He even had a glass of wine – his first in 40 years – to celebrate.
She was also candid about what she thought. “The MBE is a small degree of recognition,” she said. “I think he’s worth more than that. He still holds all these records and he’s
Harry Kane, behind by 53 years, 191 goals and four trophies, somehow got to the MBE first
done so many things. Now he’s 80, he’s had a devastating stroke and they are finally doing something about it.
“I think they feel they have got to give him something to stop people going on about it. But Jimmy really deserves a knighthood.”
It was an oversight that also used to baffle his great friend, Ian St John.
“How crazy is that?” he told The Daily Telegraph before his own death earlier this year. “Jimmy gave wonderful enjoyment to football fans and was then on the television for years giving entertainment and fun to people. He had two careers. I’m not knocking other players, but Jimmy was operating on a different planet. Jimmy is quite simply one of the greatest players to have ever kicked a football.”
Greaves’s son, Danny, previously noted that his father “wasn’t very politically correct” and was one of the first celebrities to publicly reveal their alcoholism, but was probably closer to the explanation when he simply noted that “as a nation we don’t necessarily sing about our heroes and our great players”.
The more thorny question is whether we even do enough to look after them properly in later life. Greaves clearly came from a different time, when footballers shared the same pubs as their fans, and still needed to work in later life. And, having sold his World Cup winner’s medal, he has been significantly helped in recent years by Tottenham Hotspur. But the blunt truth is that there is a much wider unseen health crisis among former footballers, of whom many are suffering with devastating neurological disease. Football’s collective failure to organise anything approaching an adequate care fund is an ongoing disgrace.
Harry Redknapp was a great friend of Greaves, as well as Bobby Moore, and still gets visibly angry at how England’s World Cup-winning captain was treated in later years. “A bit like Bobby, everybody loved Jimmy – he was a genius,” he said.
He is right. And yet, even as football paid its respects, it was somehow hard not to be reminded of Jack Charlton’s observation about an industry that he knew so well.
“People in football will look after you when it’s in their interests to look after you – when it’s not in their interests, they won’t,” he said.