But my own favourite encomiums come from the writers – the hardbitten hacks of football journalism whose lives George enriched and colourised whenever he sprinkled genius across the miserable, muddy football fields of the First Division. And you can feel their refreshment in the prose they produced about him.
“With feet as sensitive as a pickpocket’s hands, his control of the ball under the most violent pressure was hypnotic,” wrote the legendary Hugh McIllvanney. “The bewildering repertoire of feints and swerves . . . and balance that would have made Isaac Newton decide he might as well have eaten the apple.”
“Now it seems impossible that he did so much so quickly, that his football remains so vivid for all those who witnessed it,” marvelled James Lawton.
“Before he was 20 he played like a man, but no ordinary one: he did everything you could do on a football field with astonishing grace and courage and power.”
