I've written quite a few times about how daft our honours system is, most recently about how Bob Paisley only got the OBE rather than the knighthood given to Alex Ferguson and the lack of any honour for the last English manager to win a European trophy, Howard Kendall (A Time of Giants -even if they weren't honoured 27 January).
Both Kendall and Paisley are dead so that can't be rectified. But an equally egregious example has come to my attention. The player who has scored more goals than anyone else in the history of top flight English football is still alive and has no honour at all. Not even a miserable MBE. That of course is Jimmy Greaves, who scored 357 goals in the old English First Division, for Chelsea, Tottenham and West Ham between 1959 and 1969. Greaves played 12 games for AC Milan in 1961 en route between Spurs and Chelsea, scoring 9 goals.
Greaves also holds the record for the most times as leading goalscorer in English top flight season: 6. In the modern era Thierry Henry achieved that feat 4 times and Gary Lineker and Alan Shearer 3 times. Shearer doesn't have an MBE or an OBE - he has a CBE. And Lineker an OBE (er, why a lower honour than Shearer??) But then they are TV personalities. Oops, so was Greavsie.
One can only wonder how the brains of the people who operate the honours system work. What did Greaves ever do to be overlooked? Well, he didn't have much luck with the 1966 World Cup. He had hepatitis before the tournament but recovered to claim his starting place as England's number one striker for the tournament. But he lost his place in the team during the run to the 1966 World Cup win. Greaves played in all three group matches but, in the third, had his shin raked by a French player, needing 14 stitches in the wound. Geoff Hurst came in and did well. Greaves was fit again for the final, giving Alf Ramsey a decision to make. Ramsey understandably stuck with Hurst and the rest is history. Greaves, the outstanding English striker of his generation, played only three more times for England.
Mind, if Greaves had played in the final he probably would have had to wait until 2000 for a Miserable Bl**dy Emblem, as did Alan Ball and four other members of the 1966 winning team. Ball, after all, was only the man of the match. Greaves, a squad player who had played three times in the finals and only missed one game when fit, wasn't included in this belated sweep up.
Greaves had problems with alcohol after his playing career ended but overcame that. And anyway such things have never stopped politicians getting to the House of Lords.
Plenty of folk have turned down honours but that presumably does not apply to Greaves, who had a stroke in 2015 and is now in poor health, as his family have recently publicly lobbied for him to be honoured before it is too late, hoping that a recently published biography will underline his contribution to English football.
That contribution was immense. I don't remember Greaves playing for Chelsea , but when he joined Spurs they were the most glamorous football club in the country. In the early 1960s, when I began paying attention, their glory, glory hallelujah nights in early European football are a black and white TV childhood memory of mine. They got to the semi-final of the European Cup in 1962 and became the first British club to win a major European trophy, winning the Cup Winners' Cup in 1963, though the memory of their 1962 F A Cup final win against Burnley is clearer for me. Greaves scored of course. I can also remember watching enthralled as Greaves battled with another hero of mine, Everton's World Cup winner Ray Wilson, in a match at Goodison in the mid 1960s.
I've made my position clear on our risible honours system: I'd scrap it without a second thought. In principle it could be retained for public service but I don't see how one could stop the jobs for the boys (and girls) brigade getting in on the act along with worthy unsung citizens. So get rid. But if not, at least do the job properly and recognise Jimmy Greaves now.
If I was Alan Shearer or Gary Lineker I don't think I could keep my gong knowing Greaves hadn't got one.
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