(A piece I wrote a couple of months ago.  He is now out of hospital)

Those of us who follow football will no doubt be aware that Wayne Rooney stands 2 goals behind the record number of goals scored for England by Bobby Charlton.  He will, no doubt, shortly break this record and lay claim to the title of England’s Greatest Goalscorer.

A Pretender in my view.

Lying in a hospital bed at the moment is one James Peter Greaves, formerly of Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur, AC Milan, West Ham and England.  A lifelong alcoholic (he will maintain that you never recover, even if you don’t touch a drop ever again) he has suffered a stroke.

Jimmy Greaves stands in 4th place of all-time England goalscorers with 44 goals and, you might argue, is therefore 4th best England goalscorer behind Charlton, Rooney and Gary Lineker.

But whereas Charlton’s 49 goals were scored in 106 matches, Rooney’s 47 in 104 and Lineker’s 48 in 80, Greaves scored his 44 in only 57 matches.

A good strike rate for a player is reckoned to be a goal every 2 games.  Charlton and Rooney both fall below this benchmark while Lineker makes it.  Greaves’s average, by contrast, is almost a goal a game for England.

I am unashamedly biased in favour of the Little Master.  Memory (and nostalgia) plays tricks, of course, but my treasure chest is filled with such mental snips of him dribbling his way through the entire Manchester United defence in a 5-1 win in 1965.

The match reports in our Sunday People always seemed to end with the sentence, “Greaves, who had done nothing up to this point, collected the ball, turned on a sixpence and rifled home the winner in the 89th minute”.

As the greatest goalscorer of his and subsequent generations it must break his heart when his grandkids ask if he played in England’s World Cup Final win of 1966.  He was dropped by Alf Ramsey and watched from the sidelines – this in the days before substitutes.  The bitter-sweetness electrified for him for all time by his replacement, Geoff Hurst, scoring a hat-trick in the 4-2 win.

Hang in there Greavesie.  Play to the final whistle.