April 15 – Bestie’s NI Debut
FOOTBALLING debates in the pub over a few pints always pass the time. Here at OTFD we’ve been having rather a long-running one about which playing position is the least important in any team. Two camps have emerged, some think wingers, others the full-backs, but in the best Neil Buchanan off Art Attack tradition, ‘try it yourself’ and see what you come up with.
Another pointless and unprovable football debate concerns the best player never to play at the World Cup. For this one, we think you can’t really look any further than George Best.
The reason the supremely gifted Georgie never graced the World Cup is that he played for Northern Ireland who failed to qualify for a tournament during his playing days. Today in 1964 young George was just 17 when he turned out for his country for the first time in a match against Wales in Swansea.
Also making his international debut for Northern Ireland that day was 18-year-old Pat Jennings, the former Spurs and Arsenal goalkeeper who now holds the record for most caps for his country at 119.
“I was just coming out of the third division with Watford when I got capped,” Jennings said in 2005.
“I hadn’t come up against George with Manchester United – and that was the first I had really seen of him, even though there had been a few headlines in the papers before that.
“As soon as I saw him, I knew that this was a special talent,” Jennings recalled.
“It was a real wet night on a boggy pitch and he was just skating over the top of the ground. You knew that this was somebody special, even at that age.”
The match, a Home International Championship tie, finished 3-2 to Northern Ireland. Bestie didn’t score that night but went on to play for his country 37 times, scoring nine goals.
Jennings added: “I was his room-mate. He played 37 times for Northern Ireland and I roomed with him on all those occasions.
“He was not only a fantastic player, to me he was also a fantastic bloke. The George Best I met then is the same George Best I knew years later. He was no different to the rest of us, but over the years, he became more and more popular, and couldn’t do the simple things like the rest of us – like going shopping on an afternoon – because he got recognised wherever he went.
“In those days, after training we’d go out on the town whether it was in London, Belfast or somewhere else but a lot of the times he’d just sit in the room and watch television because he’d get tortured whenever he went out.
“And that was in the nicest possible way – people would just chase him for autographs and photographs.”
Sadly for Best, he only just missed the high points of the Northern Ireland team at the beginning and the end of his career. They played in the 1958 World Cup when George was just 12, and then qualified for the 1982 tournament. Best was apparently briefly considered for the squad for the competition in Spain but he was way past his best and did not go.
Have a look at the clip above to see him toying with England and making a monkey out of Gordon Banks, and come back tomorrow for more from us.
Today is also the anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster. Read about that here.
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