Brian Glanville: something we had never heard before

The great English football writer shaped the craft like no other

I wonder what Brian Glanville, the doyen of football writing who died last week, would have made of Saturday’s FA Cup final win by Crystal Palace. Glanville was a football writer who transcended football writing, elevating it to an art, giving it a depth and often acerbic sensibility that made him a giant of journalism, an entertainer and a sorcerer of language.

Glanville, who has passed away aged 93, was, wrote Henry Winter, one of the finest football writers of today, “…the greatest football writer this country has ever known. The joy evoked by Glanville was not only in reading his beautiful, insightful words. But also listening to his eloquent appraisal of a player, a manager, a match.

“Glanville had a rich voice and vocabulary that demanded listening to. You didn’t so much meet Glanville as have an audience with him. All the time you were in his compelling company you were aware of what a privilege it was, what knowledge was being imparted.

“Glanville was a heavyweight investigative reporter of supreme persistence and integrity who wrote hugely important pieces in the Sunday Times about Italian match-fixing amongst other scoops. As an acclaimed football correspondent, Glanville wrote powerfully about the triumphs and tribulations of the England national team in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and well into the new Millennium.”

Kevin Mitchell, once of the Guardian, wrote that he “… was what Groucho Marx might have been had the old master of the one-liner shown any interest in football. I doubt if the greatest soccer scribbler of them all – the London-born son of a Dublin dentist and an Old Carthusian expensively educated in literature and song – met Groucho (Brian knew a host of famous people), but their exchanges would surely have blistered the paint off the walls.

“Nobody swore so elegantly as Glanville, who hovered in the press box like Banquo’s ghost, the gathering’s invisible conscience, ready to deliver a scathing observation, relayed, sotto voce, to a nearby colleague like a chorus baritone in one of his favourite operas.”

He would have approved of how Martin Samuels of The Times described the Palace win: “John Peel, the Radio 1 DJ, had the widest and most eclectic taste in music. But when he was asked what he most liked to hear, he always gave the same answer. “Something I haven’t heard before,” he would say.

“And here it was; something we hadn’t heard before. The sound of Crystal Palace celebrating as they lifted a trophy. Not just at Wembley, anywhere. Not just the FA Cup, anything. Lower-tier titles, lower league prizes, regional competitions long forgotten, wartime prizes that have receded into the most distant memory, Palace have a ramshackle collection of them all. But nothing major. Nothing to be coveted. Palace have never won anything that in our modern world, really counted. Until yesterday evening. Until this moment. We heard something we had never heard before, saw something we had never seen. Something different, something wonderful. Something, as Eddie Cochran once sang, else.”

And, also, this too from Barney Ronay of The Guardian: “As the final whistle was blown at Wembley there was a moment that seemed to stretch out and become frozen in time. The Crystal Palace players collapsed where they were standing, crumpled across the grass like a battle scene fresco. The colours made it beautiful, red and blue against the deep green, new optics, new names, the unstyled celebrations of players unused to these moments, Jean-Philippe Mateta face down, Will Hughes flat on his back, arms spread like a snow angel.

“There was a rush of noise as the clock began to tick again. And that was that. Sound the tram bells, unleash the smoke plumes from the Tasty Jerk shack – 119 years into Crystal Palace’s existence this mercurial club with the clanky corrugated stadium has finally won a major trophy.”

Glanville once call Football Association chairman Bert Millichip “Bert the Inert”. He said Joao Havelange and Sepp Blatter of FIFA were “horrible people”. Paul Gascoigne was called “blessed are the playmakers” but also “a lost soul”.

“If Glanville listened to anyone, it was his enduring muse,” wrote Mitchell. “Groucho Marx’s wit was never far from his lips or his pen and Brian delighted in borrowing from the great man’s litany of smartarsedness in conversation. One of my favourites, and his, was Groucho’s quip after suffering some fools not-so-gladly: ‘I’ve had a particularly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.’ ”

Brian Glanville: something we had never heard before and may never read the likes of again.