Jimmy Greaves
English football’s greatest ever goalscorer, who later became a popular pundit alongside Ian St John
JIMMY GREAVES, the former England and Tottenham striker, who has died aged 81, was the greatest exponent of the art of finishing yet seen in English football; other forwards may have been more exciting to watch, but none surpassed him for the ease, grace and regularity with which he took goals – “like,” one observer had it, “someone closing the door of a Rolls-royce”.
For those who only knew the television pundit he became in the 1980s, after his well-publicised years as an alcoholic, it was hard to credit that Greaves had once been, by common consent, the deadliest predator in British football.
Yet the verdict of his contemporaries in the 1960s was borne out by the statistics: a record 357 goals in the First Division in just 516 games; leading scorer an unprecedented six times; the youngest player to score 100 league goals; and 45 goals in 57 international matches, a strike rate only approached by one other England player, Nat Lofthouse, who in an earlier era had scored 30 in 33 outings.
Greaves’s game was not built on hard work, and indeed for 89 and a half minutes he might do little but exchange backchat with his marker. But he had a remarkable gift for knowing where the ball might fall, and when an opportunity came he would exercise his devastating speed over 10 yards to claim yet another goal, usually from close range. Greaves made goalscoring look easy because to him it was. He could beat defenders, and had a wonderfully accurate eye that allowed his shots to be often no more than passes into the net; but above all he simply responded to instinct.
His career should have been capped with a World Cup winner’s medal. It is sometimes forgotten that he played in England’s first three matches in the 1966 tournament, and that until the quarter-final he was an established part of Alf Ramsey’s plans. Certainly he had lost a little pace to the hepatitis he contracted at the end of 1965, but only two weeks before the competition began he had scored four against Norway, taking his tally in recent matches to 21 in 24 games.
In later years, Ramsey claimed that Greaves’s failure to score in that opening round meant that he would have dropped him anyway for the quarter-final versus Argentina. Yet one wonders if Ramsey would have been so bold as to leave out a proven, world-class match winner for the untried Geoff Hurst had his hand not been forced by a French tackle in England’s third game which left Greaves needing 14 stitches in a gashed shin, and sidelined him for two matches.
Hurst duly took his chance, and though there was much popular debate as to whether Greaves should be recalled for the final, Ramsey was clearly correct not to change a winning side going into the game. Greaves could feel he had played some part in getting the team that far, but his nonselection was naturally the greatest disappointment of his career, and one from which he did not recover quickly. He was later adamant, however, that it was not, as generally believed, the prime cause of his subsequent slide towards self-destruction.
James Peter Greaves was born at Manor Park, East London, on February 20 1940. He was a child of the war and of austerity, his youth one of simple pleasures and very occasional treats, such as hop-picking holidays in Kent.
When he was 10, his father’s job as a driver on the London Underground necessitated the family moving out to Hainault, Essex; Jimmy went to Kingswood School in the town. He later ascribed his outstanding close control and shooting accuracy to the fact that for years he and his friends had to use a tennis ball for their street matches, lacking the money for a real football.
In 1956, having played for London Schoolboys, he joined Chelsea, rejecting his father’s suggestion that he become a compositor on The Times.
The next year he scored an astonishing 122 goals for the youth team, and at 17 was picked for the senior side, scoring against Spurs. It being another age, he travelled to the ground on the Tube. He would subsequently score on his debut for every team he played for, including at international level.
Chelsea, managed by Ted Drake, had won the championship in 1955, but had since failed to find consistency. During the next four years Greaves made his name as the team struggled, and finished leading scorer in the top flight in 1959 and 1961, scoring a club record 41 league goals during the latter season. Feeling that he needed better players around him, he asked for a transfer. Chelsea wanted the money, but rather than sell him to a rival club they arranged a move in 1961 to AC Milan.
Although he missed his flight after drinking too much at the airport, from nerves, Greaves was initially excited by the prospect of playing in Italy. There he would earn many times what he could in the English game, even though the maximum wage in the Football League had just been abolished.
Recently married, to Irene, he soon began to get cold feet in Lombardy, yet found he could not get out of the deal. Matters were not helped when he got on the wrong side of Milan’s martinet coach, Nereo Rocco, and he soon took against the club’s regimented approach to training, as well as the persistent local press intrusion.
On the pitch, having come from a league that favoured attacking football, he was not impressed by the ultra-cautious tactics then in fashion in Italy, although he still managed to score nine goals in his 14 appearances for Milan. Like Joe Baker and Denis Law at Torino, he was soon disenchanted by his life in Italy, and within a year was back in London, having been bought by the Spurs manager Bill Nicholson for £99,999 – a record fee, the price being set so that Greaves should not feel burdened as the first £100,000 footballer. He was still only 21.
Tottenham had become the first club to win the Double the year before, and with players such as Danny Blanchflower, Dave Mackay and Bobby Smith in the side there were some who wondered if they needed the cocky and somewhat indolent Greaves. He responded by marking his debut with a hat-trick, the first a magnificent volleyed scissor-kick that for a full second silenced an awed crowd.
In the seasons after, Spurs produced some of the most exciting attacking football of the period. In 1962, they lost in the semi-final of the European Cup to Benfica, and might have won but for several dubiously disallowed goals. They did, however, claim the FA Cup that year, defeating Burnley 3-1. Greaves opened the scoring in the final after just three minutes, the goal a miniature of his art: having overrun a pass on the left of the box, he sensed the goalkeeper adjusting his position behind him and swivelled to hit an unexpected, opportunistic and wonderfully struck shot into the net.
The next year, Spurs came second in the League and took the European Cupwinners’ Cup, so becoming the first English side to win a trophy in European competition. In the final, Tottenham destroyed the favourites Atletico Madrid 5-1, with Greaves – as he so often did – slipping his markers in the box to score twice. The result allowed English teams, after years of reverses, to feel that they had at last reached the level of their Continental counterparts, and paved the way for 20 years of dominance in the club tournaments.
After 1963, however, with Blanchflower having retired, Smith and Mackay lost to injury, and John White killed by lightning, Spurs declined as a force, despite the acquisition of such players as Pat Jennings and Alan Gilzean. Greaves, however, was still the league’s leading scorer in each of the seasons from 1963 to 1965, and in 1969, while in 1967 he won a second FA Cup when Spurs beat his former club Chelsea 2-1.
Yet already by then Greaves had started to lose his appetite for football. He later traced this not to Ramsey’s fateful decision, but to a general weariness that set in after his bout of jaundice, and his unresolved grief at the death of an infant son, James. In 1967, jaded even with the international game, he told Ramsey – who had picked him three times since the World Cup final – that he did not wish to be considered unless guaranteed a place in the starting side. At 27, his days with England were over.
Its highlights had been his part in England’s 9-3 demolition of Scotland in 1961 and his goal in England’s win over the Rest of World for the FA’S centenary in 1963. Against that, he had arguably failed to excel in both his World Cup campaigns, in 1962 and 1966. Some – Bobby Charlton for one – felt he was a player who only performed against lesser sides, and certainly when he scored three or four in internationals it was versus smaller nations.
None the less, in his eight years as an England player his rate of goalscoring was extraordinarily high, and of those who have scored more than his 44 in 57, Charlton took nearly twice as many matches to register 49, and Gary Lineker 23 more to claim 48. Wayne Rooney scored 53 goals, but in 120 matches. Greaves remains England’s striker nonpareil.
In 1970 he was sold to West Ham as the makeweight in the transfer of Martin Peters. He did not give of his best at Upton Park, and his decline into alcoholism was aided by the drinking culture at the club. He retired in 1971 and, as depression set in, he spent much of the next five years in a near-senseless daze.
At the peak of his addiction he was downing 20 pints a day, as well as eight or 10 doubles, and perhaps a bottle of vodka before getting up in the morning. He was haunted by fears of committing suicide and his several businesses failed under the strain, as, very nearly, did his marriage. For a time, he was confined in the alcoholics’ ward of a psychiatric hospital.
Thereafter, he sought help from Alcoholics Anonymous and, admirably, begun to rebuild his life. He played a few non-league games with Barnet and, having been reunited with his wife and forsworn drink, gradually forged a new career in television, first with ATV and then on ITV breakfast television, where he previewed the evening’s viewing alongside the puppet Roland Rat. Then from 1982 until 1992 he and Ian St John presented Saint and Greavsie, a weekly look at the lighter side of football.
The programme fixed in the younger public’s mind the image of Greaves as a somewhat tedious relic of the 1960s, his light-hearted cast of mind reflected in his catchphrase: “It’s a funny old game”. That, however, was in fact the creation of Harry Enfield, who for a time voiced Greaves’s caricature for Spitting Image.
Greaves wrote a column for The Sun for many years and did occasional promotional work. He published an autobiography, Greavsie, in 2003. Written by Les Scott, it was notable for its improbably well-turned prose. More like Greaves was its nostalgic regret for the passing of the less crass age he had once graced so sublimely.
He had suffered from increasingly poor health in old age, and in 2015 was largely disabled by a second, severe stroke.
A year earlier, he had sold the World Cup winners medal that he and the other squad players had been belatedly awarded in 2009. In 2021 he was appointed MBE along with Ron Flowers, the last two surviving members of the 1966 squad to be decorated.
Jimmy Greaves is survived by his wife Irene (née Braden), whom he married in 1958, and with whom he renewed his wedding vows in 2017 and by two sons and two daughters; one son, Danny, became a striker for Southend United.