Ice-cold and Alex : A tale of two strikers | OneFootball

Jimmy Greaves had more reason than most to call football “a funny old game.”

His speed of foot and thought, aided by an ice-cool temperament, combined to produce a marksman who was every defender’s worst nightmare.

In the top flight of the English game, he scored 357 times in 516 appearances. Better than two goals every three times he played.

With 44 goals in 57 games for England, including six hat-tricks, he should have started the 1966 World Cup final. Aged 26 and in his prime, he was selected for the three group games by Alf Ramsey but a gashed shin caused him to be replaced by Geoff Hurst for the quarter-final. Ramsey was nothing if not loyal. Hurst kept his place and the rest is history.

Nobody under 60 is likely to have watched him in action, except on old TV or film clips. Even those of pensionable age might remember him more for his TV show alongside Ian St John, which can now be seen as a trailblazer for the plethora of light entertainment sports programmes polluting the airwaves.

Saint and Greavsie ran from 1985-92, an amusing alternative to Football Focus, the more straitlaced Grandstand pot-boiler. The double act was dropped by ITV soon after Sky won the rights to top-flight football.

St John played the dour Scot, Greaves the chuckling Essex boy. Just as during his first career, he made it all look so easy. “A funny old game” became his catchphrase, while St John would respond with “You slay me, Greavsie,” whenever his partner in crime cracked a joke.

On the pitch Greaves was a natural. His gifts seemed unhindered by smoking, drinking and a dislike of training. Eddie Scambler, a venerable colleague on my first newspaper at Whitley Bay, told me of the day he met Greaves. Eddie was a reporter on the Carlisle evening paper at the time and Spurs were in town for an FA Cup tie. It was big news in Cumberland, so Eddie was sent to interview Bill Nicholson, the visiting manager. The players were being put through a strenuous pre-match routine.

All except Greaves, skulking at the side of the pitch, puffing on a ciggy and showing not the slightest interest in physical exercise.

Eddie told me years later that Greaves looked more like a young vagrant than a legendary sportsman. He was a 5ft 8in fox in the box of the highest calibre.

A different era, in many ways a different game. There have been a few great finishers since Greaves, who did little outside the penalty area but almost everything when and where it counted.

You probably all have a favourite striker, with Malcolm Macdonald, Kevin Keegan, Peter Beardsley and Andrew (don’t call me Andy) Cole on many lists among Newcastle United fans. Alan Shearer, certainly. Michael Owen, perhaps not. Some possessed power, some possessed pace, Supermac had both. However, even his biggest fan would struggle to swear he boasted supreme control when faced with the biggest challenge in football, sticking the pig’s bladder into the onion bag.

Rare indeed is the goalscorer with speed, skill and ice running through his veins.

Fortunately, we have a No9 of that ilk in black-and-white stripes this season, though he wears No14. He’s not a traditional centre-forward and he’s not great in the air, but boy, does he know how to find the back of the net.

Of Premier League strikers in this millennium, he reminds me most of Thierry Henry (who wore 14 for Arsenal) and the Liverpool version of Fernando Torres, before he lost his way and moved to Chelsea. Only time will tell whether Alexander Isak can match or exceed their achievements. The signs are encouraging. His footwork would grace Strictly Come Dancing. His movement off the ball can be sheer perfection. And he never seems to lose his cool.

In a first season with United blighted by injury, Alexander Isak scored 10 times from 18 starts and nine appearances off the bench. In his second season he has (so far) 23 goals from 36 appearances, including four as a substitute.

Isak is no overnight sensation, unlike Greaves, who scored his first Chelsea goal aged 17 on his top-flight debut. However, our super Swede is still relatively young. He will not turn 25 until a few games into the new season. He’s getting better, month by month. And he has probably not yet peaked. His strike rate for the Magpies is far better than for Real Sociedad during his three seasons in La Liga.

No wonder transfer bids north of £100m are being mooted. When Greaves returned in 1961 from a brief and ill-starred time in Milan, he cost Spurs £99,999. The fee avoided him becoming the first £100,000 player in British football.

His seasons with a second London club were, in truth, not as staggeringly prolific as with his first. At Chelsea he scored 124 in 157 games; at Spurs, a mere 220 in 321. The former teenage star ended his top-flight career at West Ham in 1971, scoring 13 in 38 appearances, a one-in-three striker aged 31.

Perhaps that less-than-ideal lifestyle caught up with Greavsie more quickly than the lumbering defenders he bamboozled for 15 years. Perhaps he tired of being kicked black and blue by bigger opponents happy to whack anything that moved. The drink clearly didn’t help.

While spending a few seasons in non-league football, he sought help from Alcoholics Anonymous and was treated in a psychiatric hospital. By the end of the Seventies he was sober, remaining so until his death in September 2021.

Twelve years earlier, he and the other remaining members of Ramsey’s squad who had not played against West Germany in July 1966, were presented with World Cup winners’ medals. His fetched £44,000 at auction in 2014. As Jimmy Greaves would tell you if he were still alive today: “It’s a funny old game.”