Simply the Best

“I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars - the rest I just squandered”

George Best was simply the best explosive mixture you can get. One half wonder and one half boy, a true wonder boy for British football who scored fantastic goals on the pitch but made one crucial own-goal away from it that cost him his life a few hours ago.

George Best was already in the nadir of his footballing career when I was born. I can only appreciate what he did from footage shown now and then. Tributes from all over the world are proof enough he was one of the greatest of all time. If Pele says he was the finest then it is true.

Best loved Malta. He once played against Hibernians in the European Cup, and ended up winning it with Manchester United in 1968. Many years later, in 2002, he had just returned to England from a holiday in Malta when he had a liver transplant. He never fully recovered. The following year, his wife Alex left abruptly from yet another holiday in Malta amid rumours George was having an affair.

What a pity he ushered in the era of the football star, an era where many football players seek the zeros in their pay-cheques before the number of goals they are going to score. It’s an era when the Glazers turn a football team into a money-making machine first and then a goal-scoring machine second. It’s an era where the Japanese look up to the European Beckhams and Del Pieros or South American Ronaldinhos as a new sort of demi-gods. It’s an era where playing for the national team is a pain in the arse because you get nothing substantial except for personal pride and the club is scared shitless it may lose the services of its stars for such useless events. Even the singing the national anthems of the teams before a match is being considered dangerous.

We need football heroes. Best was one of them. Though he lost his most important match, the one for his life, he fought to the last in pure British style. We should all emulate the golden boy for what he stood for in the field but despise all the rest he did. Indeed, that was truly immense potential squandered.

Tributes from Maltese bloggers:
Guze' Stagno
Jacques Rene' Zammit