“In matches he would come back to me - ‘Pat give me the ball, give it to me.’ So I would give him the ball just outside the box and he would run at whoever was trying to kick him.” I think Billy Bingham did look at him,” says the former Northern Ireland goalkeeper Pat Jennings. “The one real regret I have for him is he never managed to get in the ‘82 World Cup. There is a morality tale somewhere and from the people who knew him a lingering frustration that as Best walked along the precipice of his life, the most exciting footballer in the game never saw a World Cup finals or even, beyond the European Cup in 1968, an extended run in European football. Throughout, he was the man who couldn’t grow old, who found himself forever paused in a lifestyle that consumed him. He brought Carnaby Street to the pitch like a blinding flash of cravat to the backdrop of dimly lit Manchester and in the ’60s and early ’70s Belfast’s dystopian monochrome. A poster boy for the liberated ’60s as much as Mick Jagger, or Twiggy, he swung through the grim flat cap, post war ’50s and onto an Old Trafford stage as the sexiest face in the sexiest club in world football. “When you were lucky enough to have been in his company you could tell George was idolised by both sides.”īest was a catalyst for change in how footballers played, how they looked. The two subsequently played on the Northern Ireland team together, where Nicholl is now assistant coach. You never for a minute stopped to think ‘I wonder if he’s a Catholic or a Protestant,” says Jimmy Nicholl, who arrived at Tommy Doherty’s Manchester United in 1974, the year Best left. George Best received his first red card for Northern Ireland after throwing mud at the referee at Windsor Park, on April 18th 1970. But without knowing it, Best was a healer, his energy not noticeably orange or green in a city poisoned by such distinctions.įor his outings with Northern Ireland, fans from nationalist West Belfast would flood into the hostile ‘Village’ streets around Windsor Park just to see him. From the plain family grave to his terraced house on the Cregagh estate and the murals around the streets and motorway underpasses, Best’s death as much as his life was a kind of wonder and envy, never less than loved, always Belfast’s boy.Ĭregagh is staunchly loyalist turf. In Belfast, now, his ghost is everywhere. Never less than a shimmering presence around the heavy winter grounds of the north of England, Best played a game nobody else could and lived a life few others would.
When he was visible he gave bewitching agency to the underpowered post-1968 European Cup winning Manchester United side. The last piece of commentary on how George Best lived his life comes without the E-Type glamour he brought to football.įor much of his living life, Best seemed somehow to exist as an ethereal presence, who appeared and then disappeared, who arrived and departed, who grew to hate the public glare and was rarely out of it. Some 16 years on from his death on November 25th 2005, a simple black headstone still marks his grave.