Those old television clips of George Best can't even begin to convey the truth of the man's genius, for his talent was so full, so flowing, so majestic that no single game could encompass all his mesmerising qualities. Certainly no footage exists of perhaps his most amazing match, which lives on only in the memories of the survivors of the 35,000 people there.
You have to be a certain age to have been present then, when Manchester United visited Leicester City, and I have that melancholy distinction. Leicester were - briefly - a modest power in the footballing world: they had reached the FA Cup Final twice in the previous four years, and were above Manchester United in the First Division. Early in the match, George Best, just turned 19, was injured. In those days, substitutes were not allowed, and since his injury merely slowed him down rather than incapacitated him, he dropped back to midfield.
There followed the most sublime individual footballing performance I - or anyone in the ground - have ever seen. Unable to dribble or run, he orchestrated affairs from the centre of the pitch with a vision that was quite unearthly. He simply passed the ball, because that was all he could do; but with those strokes of matador's steel, he cut Leicester to the heart.
It was not that Leicester didn't play well; they were good enough to beat most teams that day. But there was nothing they could do about Best. He saw possibilities where others merely saw pitch. Soon a deadly chill settled on the home crowd as they watched their team being routinely, systematically and irresistibly slaughtered by a midfield cripple. An extraordinary buoyancy took hold of the Manchester United forwards. All they had to do was to wait for Georgie to plant the ball in some wholly unexpected position behind a flailing Leicester full-back or neatly over the head of a floundering centre-half for them to run on to.
There was nowhere to which he could not lob or slide the ball, and in order to prevent themselves being made utter fools of, the Leicester defence dropped back, making their offside trap quite redundant. The result was that United scored two swift goals, forcing Leicester to counter-attack.
God help them: lambs to the slaughter. In a bewitching display which combined a profound grasp of trigonometry with the insight of the chess grandmaster, George Best sent ball after ball through the Leicester defence from impossible angles into even more impossible destinations, to appreciative, if slightly stunned, applause from the Leicester crowd.
The match ended Leicester City 0, Manchester United 5. The following Saturday Leicester won away at Newcastle 5-1.
In having it all, George Best had too much. Had he been a less brilliant dribbler, a slower man on the ball, he could have been forced to play in midfield, where his incredible footballing brain could have more fully expressed itself. As it was, he played forward, where he was not given the service which his intuitively insightful mind knew was possible. But of course, that would only have been so if the George Best who put Leicester City to the sword was playing at midfield, while the other, more usual George Best, the striker, waited for the sublime through passes upon which to feast. He once described the despair he felt at match after match at endlessly seeing unexploited opportunities, whose existence no-one else remotely suspected. Intellectual frustration, quite as much as drink, was the rock upon which his career perished.
For all the words that have been uttered about him, few have dwelt upon his integrity. He was often fouled, and though he was a persistent and courageous tackler, he never intentionally hurt anyone in revenge. There was a strangely fitting congruence that as his sublime career at Manchester United ended, that other great Irish player, Roy Keane, was born; and as his life ebbed away, so too ended Roy Keane's often thuggish career at Manchester United. The differences between the players were many, but the most important was that George Best was genetically incapable of performing the infamously dreadful tackle which Keane intentionally inflicted on Alf-Inge Haaland, and which effectively ended the Norwegian international's career.
Each player was a refutation of stereotypes. The ruthless hard man who deliberately hurt people came not from east Belfast but from a pleasant Cork seaside town. The creative genius whose personal gentleness was attested by the tears of the medical staff who treated him, came from the brutal shipyard streets which produced some of the most depraved, morally insensate killers of the Troubles.
Best's character was dwarfed by his talent, his beauty, his brain, his incredible sexuality. The person has not been born who could cope with all of his gifts. The only way that as a player he could have been intellectually content was for another couple of George Bests to be playing alongside him. And what young man could resist the insistent advances of the scores of beautiful young women who, scorning any pretence of courtship, sought only the sexual recreations of his body and his bed? Four Miss Worlds sampled those pleasures; and for another three, he forgot to turn up.
George Best was burdened with more talents, and graced with more temptations, than mortal man can bear. All in all, he bore them well, gave great pleasure to millions of fans and hundreds of women, and has finally gone the way of all flesh. No reason to grieve; none at all.