Its that goal again! Another fascinating exclusive, only in Give 'Em Beans!...
The BEST is YET to COME... ...the true story of George Best's latest non-appearance in Furness
For the last couple of years George Best has made his living touring around the country in a Roadshow with Rodney Marsh. Extroverts on the pitch, Best and Marsh are equally entertaining answering an audience's questions and talking about when they played football in the Golden Age of the late 1960's. On May 28 this year they were due to visit Ulverston's Coronation Hall, when three weeks before the event, promoter Graham Eadie announced that it had been cancelled due to poor ticket sales. The reason for the low sales was said to be Best's history of non-appearances in Furness. People believed that once more he would not turn up. This is a plausible excuse. It is true that Best was due to open a firework extravaganza at Holker St. in 1969. I was one of the many disappointed kids who waited in vain for Best's appearance that night. It is also true that Best was due at the opening of Barrow speedway in 1972 but failed to show, blaming a mystery virus. Not too many Happy Faces again that night! However, his circumstances today are quite diferent from the late sixties and early seventies when, with money rolling in from football, product endorsements, personal appearances, etc., Best was at the height of his career. But in 1994 he is struggling to make a living. To put it simply, if he doesn't turn up for his roadshows, he doesn't drink. He must turn up to survive. As for the low ticket sales, if they had waited, the show would have definitely sold out. Best is a legend in the Barrow area, as he is in the rest of the country; it's just that people in Furness tend to leave things until the last minute. There were still three weeks to the show... plenty of time to buy tickets. So why didn't George Best come to the Coronation Hall? To understand the reason, consider this extract from his latest autobiography 'The Good, the Bad and the Bubbly'. "In the 1970 World Cup Pele tried to lob the goalkeeper from inside his own half. He missed by no more than a yard. I'd tried to do that. After I saw Pele attempt it I tried even harder. He knew what I was doing and I knew what he was doing and it became like a gentlemanly competition to see who could do it first. Every time we kicked off I would look up and see if the goalkeeper was off his line. And if the lob was on I would go for it. "Unfortunately, most goalkeepers quickly worked out what I was up to and I never managed it, but then neither did Pele. That didn't stop us trying, however. When we were both playing in the United States, we were forever trying to guide the ball over goalkeepers' heads from fifty, sixty yards. But we were always a tantalising couple of feet wide or the goalkeeper would manage to scramble back and turn the ball away. "It has to be possible, though. You have just got to hit the ball correctly. Someone, someday will do it. But not, I fear, any British player. They haven't got the footballing intelligence to try it. I doubt if there are more than a handful of players in the country who have the skill even to hit the target from inside the box. I see players earning anything up to £3,000 a week who can't even pass a ball twenty yards. I'm not talking about pinpoint passes of thirty or forty yards which are the sign of true greatness. I'm talking about simple bread and butter passes which the fans have every right to expect - it is the fans, after all, who are paying the wages of these clowns." For the benefit of those of you with a limited knowledge of football, Barrow's Colin Cowperthwaite scored the fastest goal in football history at Kettering Town in December 1979. From the kick-off he spotted the goalkeeper off his line - 3.55 seconds later the ball was in the back of the net. So 'British players haven't got the footballing intelligence to try it' eh, George? Cowps not only tried it - he did it, and went on to score three more goals to wrap up a 4-0 victory, but that is by the by. So the reason for Best's non-appearance is simple. His ego would not allow it. Best's ego would not allow him to come into Cowps territory. Best's ego would not allow him to come to the one place where he might meet the man who had succeeded in doing what he had spent his entire career trying and failing to do. Realising that Cowps was a superior footballer to himself and even Pele, George Best would not set foot in Furness. He can kid himself that he's the greatest footballer ever, but deep down he knows he was just a shadow of Cowps at his peak. George Best will never dare to set foot in Furness. Rodney Marsh is said to be gutted at being denied an opportunity to meet the legendary Cowps. Clint Wags Issue 020 - August 1994