George Best

Author:

By Richard Williams

Format:

Hardback

Availability:

In print, usually dispatched within 48 hours.

Price:

£9.99 £8.99 (Save 10%)

Tagged with:

Football, Biography, George Best, Essays and Journalism, Manchester United FC

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Further Details

• Published: 15th Nov 2006
• ISBN: 1845132017
• Pages: 192

From Word of Sport:

The first anniversary of the death of the subject who has shifted more football books than any other is celebrated in this collection of articles chronicling his career culled from the pages of The Guardian and its sister papers The Observer and Manchester Evening News.

It's a good idea as it offers the chance to read contemporary reports and opinions about him which ignore the sense of waste and tragedy that inevitably colour more recent accounts and to assess what he meant as a great football player rather than as a drunkard ex-great football player.

From the Publisher:

November 2006 marks the first anniversary of the death of George Best, the most magical footballer of his generation, and the most notorious and sad example of a great talent gone to waste. Now Aurum's peerless sports list combines with its extremely successful collaboration with the "Guardian" that began with "A Lifetime of Mountains" to produce a unique chronicle of Best's life.
His whole career is told through the newspaper reports and features on him that appeared in the "Guardian" and the "Manchester Evening News" from his first appearances for Manchester Utd as a teenage starlet through the glory days of the 6-0 trouncing of Northampton and the European Cup win in 1968 to the long obituary assessing his sad later decline.

These compassionate, insightful pieces are written by numerous famous - and unexpected - names, from Hugh McIllvanney to John Arlott. They reflect Best's sad destiny to become more famous for his indiscretions (his drinking, his affairs, his absences-without-leave) than his football.;They also trace his transformation from the willowy Belfast boy who become a Manchester man through and through to the rotund and peripatetic football gipsy who drifted from Fulham to the US to Hibernian and even Dunstable Town, and eventually into the sad alcoholic bar habitue in Chelsea. It is a unique chronicle of a life lived, and as a result eventually blighted, in the public eye.