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Brian Glanville, who has died aged 93, 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.
Sitting behind me in the Tottenham press box during one match, he leaned forward to remark – apropos bugger all – on the future of the then struggling young Sunday Correspondent: “It has the smell of death about it.” Garth Crooks, who was sitting next to him, was as bemused as he was amused.
The joy of Glanville was, perversely, best experienced when he was at his most vitriolic. He loved football as few others could ever do, but he detested many things about the modern game, most vehemently commercialism and corruption, and let the world know it at every available opportunity.
For most of his working life, those opportunities came around every Saturday afternoon for the Sunday Times in a golden age of football commentary as he went joke for pithy joke with the Observer’s Hugh McIlvanney, Jim Lawton of the Express, and any other of the frontline heavyweights. Glanville, like many of his contemporaries, did not often bother with quotes from the principals, but he littered his work with references that showed the depth of his cultural interests.
When he derided the efforts of a lazy full-back caught napping on the goalline as, “alone and palely loitering” he was briefly impressed that I recognised it as a line from Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci – followed by the inevitable put-down: “Did poetry in your school, did they?” No pity there, then.
It was part of what made up the Glanville we knew and loved. He was fearless – and feared. If that implies arrogance, so be it. But it was a price worth paying to hear and read the string of witticisms that lit up his work.
He would pursue a story or an opinion to the end of its useful life, such as in the Lobo-Solti match-fixing scandal of 1972-73, when he wrote a series of stories under the banner of The Year Of The Golden Fix. When colleague and longtime friend Michael Collett said to him: “Brian, I reckon you’ve made more from the scandal than they did from the fix itself,” he replied: “You’re too facking right I have.”
He did not let many earning opportunities pass him by and hoovered up all sorts of stories for Gazzetta dello Sport (he lived in Italy for many years) while simultaneously reporting on a match, major or minor. I recall one international at Wembley when he interrupted the chatter to inquire: “Anyone hear the results of the rowing from Nottingham?” There was an Italian competing.
He wrote and spoke across several mediums – books, plays, occasional commentary, film and radio scripts – upsetting listeners in a 1950s BBC play about Hendon’s Jewish community in north London, where he had grown up. It did not seem to bother him. Brian was at his happiest when looking in from the outside.
As a scriptwriter, Glanville left us with many pearls in the incomparable film of the 1966 World Cup, Goal! When his beloved Italy went out to North Korea – a shock on a par with Vesuvius, in his opinion – he put in the narrator’s mouth the memorable aside: “So Italy go home to their tomatoes.” He also wrote, acidly, of the North Koreans: “So little known, they might be flying in from outer space.”
The film, matchless for its sense of drama and sun-drenched nostalgia, gripped an audience that would celebrate England’s lone success at the highest level in the final. The campaign reached an ugly crescendo, however, in the foul-filled quarter-final win over Argentina. Glanville’s contribution was that “it is famous not just for Geoff Hurst’s controversial offside goal but the Argentines’ dirty tactics, which included spitting and kicking”. That unvarnished assessment came from Glanville’s rock-solid confidence in his own judgment. He would listen to an argument, but not often back down.
His then sports editor, the late Chris Nawrat, once insisted he finally go and talk to the England manager Bobby Robson (after years of roasting him in print without a single quote). Brian reluctantly trudged off with the paper’s peerless photographer, Chris Smith, who would also operate the reel-to-reel tape recorder for the historic showdown.
When they returned to the office, Glanville – technically illiterate – said it had gone so well they nearly ran out of tape, adding: “What the bloody hell am I supposed to do with it now?” “Transcribe it, Brian,” Nawrat said, surreptitiously tying some twine from the nearby art desk around Glanville’s ankle until he pressed all the right knobs and the job was done several hours later.
If Glanville listened to anyone, it was his enduring muse. 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.”
But any evening with Brian was unfailingly entertaining, a gift even. Another one gone, then, “home to his tomatoes”.
Kevin Mitchell was the Guardian’s award-winning tennis and boxing correspondent
