Top of the league At 90, novelist Brian Glanville remains the king of football writers. By Michael Henderson
T
here has never been a football writer quite like Brian Glanville and, given the game’s enslavement by television, there never will be another. Glanville, who turns 90 on 24th September, in his glory days at the Sunday Times bestrode the press boxes of England like a monarch. In his autumnal years, younger journalists continue to make the pilgrimage to his home in Holland Park to share gossip and, if they’re lucky, receive a kingly blessing. Glanville is much more than a sportswriter. He has published novels and short stories, and contributed to That Was The Week That Was when satire meant more than spewing four-letter words. But it was his writing on football that set him apart. As Patrick Barclay, one of his most gifted successors, noted, ‘There are two kinds of football writer: those who have been influenced by Brian Glanville and those who should have been.’ Educated at Charterhouse, Glanville took himself off to Italy at the age of 19. By then he was already an author, having ghosted the autobiography of his childhood hero, Cliff ‘Boy’ Bastin, whose goals helped to win five First Division championships and two FA Cups for Arsenal. In Italy, Glanville established his reputation writing for Corriere della Sera, and it was his knowledge of Italian (and European) football that defined his identity when he returned to England, and the Sunday Times. There had been some fine writers on football, but Glanville enjoyed unmatched authority. For two generations of readers, an England fixture on Wednesday could not be said to be over until Glanville had pronounced judgement in his Sunday column. ‘Callaghan, me no Callaghan,’ he wrote in 1977 when Ron Greenwood, picking his first team as England manager, selected Ian Callaghan, the journeyman Liverpool player, instead of Trevor Brooking, whom he had nurtured at West Ham. ‘Brooking towers above him in sheer class.’ A majestic rebuke! Two years later, when the dithering Greenwood dropped midfielder Glenn Hoddle, after the Spurs man had scored a wonderful goal on his England debut,
Greenwood told reporters, ‘Glenn must learn that disappointment is part of football.’ Glanville pondered, ‘Yes, but whose disappointment?’ His prose was never flowery. Not for him the colourful diversions of the Observer’s Hugh McIlvanney, a brilliant writer who eventually lapsed into flatulent self-parody. There was no ‘thrilling relevance’ in any performance that Glanville witnessed, though midfield players could occasionally be considered ‘protean’. He preferred to write in clear, precise sentences, every word ticked off shortly after five o’clock on Saturday afternoons. Though never a confrontational man, he had strong likes and dislikes, and always made himself visible at press conferences. George Graham, the Arsenal manager, was once stung into making a pointed proclamation, ‘Quality will out,’ by Glanville’s notice the previous week. Graham received a swift answer: ‘Should we see any, George, we’ll let you know.’ After leaving the Sunday Times he continued to write for World Soccer as a kind of essayist emeritus. Not greatly enamoured of the modern game, which is rolling in the kind of money beyond the dreams of Boy Bastin, he has never lost his love for a game that he himself played into his seventh decade for Chelsea Casuals, a pick-up XI founded for his own amusement. Until a couple of years ago, he could regularly be found in a press box somewhere in London, hoping to see something memorable. Tom Stoppard said of Ken Tynan, the great drama critic, that you were keen to have his approval. Sportsmen, like actors, have the chance to write their own notices every time they step on stage. And when the approval comes from an observer like the great Glanville, the words can glow like coals. Back of the net! Glanville, 90 in September
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