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Jimmy Greaves deserves more from a game - and country - he served for so long as top goalscorer of his generation

Jimmy Greaves in action at the 1966 World Cup finals
Greaves was injured in the final group game of the 1966 World Cup but didn't regain his place in team Credit: Getty Images

It is almost four years now since Jimmy Greaves suffered the stroke that has hastened his decline considerably in recent times, and now at 79 the quality of his life is, by the admission of those closest to him, very far from where the Greaves family would like it to be.

The greatest goalscorer of his era, certainly the greatest ever top-flight goalscorer in English football, is living out his days in the village of Little Baddow, near Chelmsford, in Essex, now requiring full-time care. He still has his wife Irene, whom he married at 18, by his side. His son Danny, himself once a professional at Southend United and the third of the couple’s four surviving children, says his family are coping as best they can. “My mum is a lot better now than when the stroke first happened,” he says when we speak this week. “It took her a couple of years.”

The family, now numbering 10 grandchildren and a further three great grandchildren, take Jimmy out for lunch a couple of times a week although he is now severely disabled and wheelchair-bound. When the time comes, the passing of Greaves will, one imagines, prompt an enormous wave of sadness and nostalgia for generations of English football fans who knew him first as the master goalscorer and then as one of the great television personalities of the 1980s.

It is why the family have agreed to collaborate with the most recent book about Greaves’ life Natural, written by David Tossell, which is by no means the first of the oeuvre but one which, critically, is intended to draw together Greaves’ achievements while he is still alive. He has never been recognised by the honours system and there is nothing named after him by the Football Association at Wembley Stadium.

His record stands for itself, including that stupendous return of 44 England goals in 57 caps and that record 366 goals in top-flight European football – including nine at AC Milan – that was finally surpassed in 2017 by Cristiano Ronaldo. Even so, Greaves can often feel left out of the roll call of great English sportsmen and women.

Harry Kane with Jimmy Greaves
Harry Kane received an MBE this week, but Jimmy Greaves is yet to be recognised by the honours system Credit: Getty Images

Clearly the story would have been different had Jimmy been in the 1966 World Cup-winning team, and Danny, 56, wonders if his father’s naturally outspoken nature, especially during those golden years on ITV, would have put noses out of joint at the FA. 

In recent times, the FA has given financial support, along with the Professional Footballers’ Association and Tottenham Hotspur. 

As for honours, when Harry Kane can collect an MBE at the age of 25 it is easy to see why Danny asks why his father has never qualified for the same.

Jimmy was a schoolboy prodigy whom Chelsea lured away from Spurs just as he was about to sign. Tossell’s book records how, as a 16-year-old in the 1956-57 season, Jimmy’s final one before breaking into Chelsea’s first team, he scored 114 goals for the club’s various sides including 77 in 30 matches for the youth team. 

Where did this natural talent come from? His father James senior, a tube driver on the Central Line, was a Barnardo’s boy and all attempts by the family to trace his lineage have come to nothing.

The alcoholism that Greaves suffered from and then took on was, Danny believes, symptomatic of the culture of the game. When his father, aged 21, finally left Chelsea in 1961 for a move to AC Milan that would lead to his wages rising from £20 a week – then the maximum permitted – to £130 a week, he spent £1,000 of his signing-on fee on a farewell party. 

It was held at Parsons Green bowling club. Greaves spent a similar amount on legal fees trying to get out of the move to Milan when later in 1961 the Football League maximum wage was finally abolished.

There was also the question of what effect the death of Jimmy and Irene’s first child, Jimmy junior, at four months, had on his father. Having suffered from pneumonia, Jimmy jnr was found dead in his cot, before the short-lived move to Italy. 

Jimmy Greaves worked with Ian St John on the TV program Saint and Greavsie
Greaves was one half of the hugely-popular Saint and Greavsie show on ITV in the 1980s and 1990s with Ian St John

“Neither of my parents has ever mentioned or spoken about that,” Danny says. They were not, he says, a generation who openly discussed loss and trauma. On balance Danny feels that it was the boozing culture in football that caught his father rather than Jimmy jnr’s death.

In Natural, Tossell tells the story of Greaves, by then seven years sober, being asked by the wife of his former Spurs team-mate Cliff Jones to stage an intervention with her husband whom she feared was slipping into alcoholism post-retirement. 

It is a moving account, and Jones says that he still recalls Greaves’ words to him then. “ ‘Look, Cliff,’ ” he began, “ ‘you have got a wonderful family, a nice home, you have got a job. Do you want to lose those things?’ ” The two men stayed in contact. “It changed my life,” Jones says, “not just my life but my family’s.”

The boozy stories of Greaves’ life can at least be told in the knowledge that they had a happy ending. Few beat the account of the day he completed the famously gruelling 1970 World Cup Rally as a celebrity co-driver.

Conceived as a promotional tool for the British car industry, it finished in Mexico City and Greaves, left out of the 1970 World Cup squad, went in search of Bobby Moore, who, in the aftermath of the Bogota necklace incident, was at the British embassy.

It is a story told many times by Greaves over the years on the after-dinner circuit, and it never gets old. Helped over an embassy wall and eluding the security guards, he let himself in and found Moore sipping a beer and reading a magazine. “ ‘Right, Mooro,’ ” he blurted out to his startled host. 

‘What have you done with that bracelet?’ ”

It has been an extraordinary life, well worth the telling and the celebrating all over again.

Grealish needs to step up a division to win first cap

Quite a turnaround in the England fortunes of Jack Grealish, who learnt after the Czech Republic game last week that he would have to be playing in the Premier League to be considered, only for Gareth Southgate to turn up at Villa Park today to watch him.

Villa’s home-grown playmaker is an unusual case for Southgate, who has picked Mason Mount from the Championship this season, the Chelsea loanee on loan at Derby County. In Grealish’s case, his switch from the Republic of Ireland meant that he has not progressed through the age-group sides in the same way as Mount, who was a junior international when Southgate was working for the Football Association across the age groups. 

If Villa are not promoted this summer then Grealish knows now, if he did not already, that he will have to go whether his club have to sell him or not.

 

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