Brian Glanville, greatest of football reporters, has died aged 93

The first things I can remember, as a child, reading with pleasure in an adult newspaper are Brian Glanville's football reports for the Sunday Times.

He was still teaching me new words when I was 16. I can recall his writing about England's 3-2 victory over Italy in the USA's Bicentennial tournament. England fielded two young debutants: Gordon Hill, a left wing from Tommy Docherty's exciting Manchester United side, and Ray Wilkins (often called Butch Wilkins in those days), the 19-year-old Chelsea captain.

He described Hill as an "urchin" figure and Wilkins - in a new word for me - as a "gamin". Wilkins had looked thoroughly at home in midfield, passing the ball like an experienced international. You can see England's starting XI in the image above.

This morning I heard that Glanville has died at the age of 93. Richard Williams is quoted among the tributes on the Football Writers' Association site:

Some of us are old enough to remember a time when colleagues often sniggered at Brian Glanville’s ability to pronounce the names of foreign footballers – particularly those of Italian players – correctly.

They stopped laughing when English teams were suddenly filled with foreign players, and the ability to avoid mangling their names became a necessary part of a football reporter’s skillset. 

Brian’s interest in the game as it was played in other countries sprang from his cosmopolitan nature; it turned out to be prophetic, and I often felt that the rest of us should have been paying him some sort of pathfinder’s royalty.

A sophisticate as much at home at the Chelsea Arts Club as at Stamford Bridge, he came from a time before football became gentrified but played and wrote about it with wholehearted commitment and without condescension towards those who’d come to it via routes very different from his own.