Esquire (July 2016) now on stands: George Best

I haven't written about football at any great length since this, about Zinedine Zidane in 2006, but I'm pleased to report that I have another long piece about another truly great player - George Best - in the new Esquire. The Best essay is rather more concerned with class and culture and money and celebrity in the UK over the last 50 years than it is with what goes on inside the mind of a true master when he's out in the middle of the park - which was and is my interest in the great Zidane. But Best's gifts have been well examined, I have to say, and remain available to the eyes of newcomers on tape. What has happened to the national game in light of socio-economic changes in wider British society still has work to be done on it, in my view, and I will have more to say on that myself in a new book next year.

In footballing terms, though, there's just one thing I'd want to add to what's printed in Esquire, related to this notion of a comparison between supreme athlete and megastar musician that has advanced with the more the former receives in remuneration and adulation. The performance anxiety of a footballer ought really to exceed that of any rock star: the crowd is tougher, plus there’s an opposition whose job is to stop you playing. But Best relished adversity. In the European Cup Final of 1968 against Benfica, he was targeted, fouled, and repeatedly felled – a lesser man might have been psyched out of the game. Instead Best scored a crucial goal that put Man United on the way to their first European trophy. Not just a pretty face, to put it mildly.

Bloody England in the Summertime

I'll always remember June of 2006: a new home, our firstborn child just a few months’ old, the drama of Zidane's swansong World Cup on the telly, and – I’m certain of this – a kindling early summer heat that came off the very paving stones beneath one’s feet. Conversely the cold, dreich summer of 2007 I'll always associate with Gordon Brown. (And sometimes I feel like we're still living through it.) As for 2011 – we’ve now had the Solstice, a day I always think of as Great Gatsby Day ("I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it...") and still we’re peering up at drear skies, scouring for patches of blue... Good lord, is this how it will be from now on?

World Cup 2010: Come back, number ten...

Glimpsed in South Africa (courtesy of Getty images): the maestro, Zizou - brooding, quite likely, on this tournament's dysfunctional Domenech-led French team, as opposed to the previous tournament's dysfunctional Domenech-led French team, whom Zidane nonetheless managed to drag, as if single-handed and Sisyphean, to the brink of a second golden trophy. Would that he were out on the field this time too, doing (some of) that voodoo only he can do...

Not yet glimpsed in South Africa: much quality or verve or excitement, despite the outbreaks of local enthusiasm. I don't require the glut of goals so much as the quality play, from sides looking a bit less glum and gone in the legs (so speaks the Supreme Athlete, from his bathchair...)

The home nation's impending exit (barring a great result against the dysfunctional blah-blah French) is a major downer. Spain's misfire last night has me gloomy, too. My man in black-and-white, Jonas Gutierrez, is being played by Maradona as a defender due to Argentine injury bother. And I don't intend to spend the next 3 weeks just cheering on Miroslav Klose (another version of My Kind of Player.) What's wanted is a bit of magic from The Man in the #10 Shirt - yes, shirt of Zidane, Maradona, Platini, Pele, Puskas. That's where the inciting genius is usually found. So play up, Kaka, Messi, Podolski, Fabregas, Sneijder! Make sure you'll all be around come the knock-outs, then go do that voodoo that you do so well...

Bookhugger column #3: Fit to Wear the Shirt

Newly posted on Bookhugger, with the World Cup coming down the pipe at us, this month's literary musing of mine is on the very serious matter of books about football. Let me say straight up, there are too bloody many of them, and most of them are bloody rubbish. But the good ones are really, really good. In the piece I reiterate my admiration for the gifts of such artists as Gordon Burn, Ian Hamilton, Richard Williams, Leopoldo Luque, Kenny Dalglish and Zinedine Zidane; and I rehash my by-now-even-to-me-tiresome dislike of the English national team - an antipathy that would be dissolved instantly (if but temporarily) were Fabio Capello sufficiently distracted to pick Bensham's Andy Carroll up front and put Steve Harper from Easington in nets.

Zidane, formidable...

Memory lane... reading the just-published 'news novel' Born Yesterday by Gordon Burn has brought back the summer of 2007 to me in all its dank, rain-steeped misery. As sorry forecasts of a warm but wet July/August 08 start to surface, a good time then to recall the baking-hot cold-beer World Cup summer of 2006. For me that was all about the slow return to supreme form - and the sudden exit pitch-left - of the player in white seen in the photo montage above (this by premasagar on Flickr.) I wrote about this and other aspects of the great Zizou in an essay you can read here from Sight & Sound, prompted by the art-movie Zidane - A 21st Century Portrait. The Guardian today reports that lucky Australians will get a rare glimpse of him back in action June 1.