Soccer in Sun and Shadow

Greaves

In a Western he would have been the fastest foot in the West. On the soccer field he scored a hundred goals before he was twenty, and by the time he was twenty-five they still hadn’t invented a lightning rod that could ground him. More than run, he exploded: Jimmy Greaves pushed off so fast, the referees used to call him offside by mistake, because they could not figure out where his sudden stabs and bull’s-eye shots came from. They would see him land, but they never saw him take off.

“I want to score so badly,” he said, “it hurts.”

Greaves had no luck at the ’66 World Cup. He did not score a single goal, and an attack of jaundice made him sit out the final.