BRIAN GLANVILLE-LEGEND SPORTS WRITER

 Brian Glanville: Charterhouse School, sorry but I am going to mention the place again, has contributed to Global Football in one way or another. We could argue that the Carthusians helped invent the organised game, the school captain was present at the first FA meeting in 1863, the Old Carthusians were the Real Madrid of their age, leading football development in the 19th Century and even providing international footballers over several decades and taking the game abroad. 

The school has also provided the sport with coaches, medics, marketers, FA officials and most importantly sports' writers. In the Sunday Times today old boy, Brian Glanville is reported to have been given a major award. Described as one of the most celebrated and influential football writers, he is honoured by the Cross Sports Book of the Year award, for his outstanding contribution to sports' writing.

He has covered 14 World Cups, working for the Sunday Times for over 30 years. The presentation takes place at Lords Cricket Ground on Wednesday. Brian began working in journalism at 16 with his first major writing as a 19 year old when he ghost wrote the autobiography on his Arsenal hero Cliff Bastin.

The list of books and various publications is long and his name can be found accompanying articles in the magazines such as World Soccer and the Italian newspaper Corriere dello Sport. He spent a lot of time writing about Italian Calcio.

In the 1960s he wrote for the satirical TV programme "That Was the Week that Was",  wrote the screen play for "Goal!", the account of the 1966 World Cup, scripted some radio and stage plays and helped select winners of the Ballon d' Or. 

"Writers have looked up to Brian with his shining example of excellence..." At 85 years old he still attended matches. The presentation was filmed by Sky Sports for broadcasting.

I met Brian Glanville on several occasions as he kept an interest in the school's football. One typical moment was when he arranged a junior football match between a Charterhouse XI and his grandson's school's side; his grandson's school only played rugby, but the game was an easy watch for both teams and spectators. It was a privilege to stand on a toucline with him and I felt that Brian would have liked his grandson to have played more soccer.

Brian Glanville was the son of an Irish dentist, of Lithuanian Jewish descent, Joseph, who changed his name from Goldberg to Glanville, and Florence (née Manches), who was from Russian and Polish Jews. After Charterhouse, he worked for a time as an articled clerk in a London law firm, before he started writing football articles and books. He had a lengthy career as a writer, beginning with ghost-writing Cliff Baston Remembers, the autobiography of his hero, at 19. A noted critique of the British style of sportswriting in Encounter magazine in the late 1950s lamented the lack of depth compared with the American style of Red Smith, Daman Runion or A J Leibling. As a journalist he spent over 30 years as a football correspondent for The Sunday Times (1958–1992), and continued to contribute pieces after leaving the post. He also contributed to World Soccer magazine for over 50 years in print and online, and authored a weekly column for the website covering a range of issues.

He spent a significant part of his career based in Italy and was seen as one of the leading authorities on Italian football as a result. Whilst based in both Florence and Rome, he wrote regularly for the Italian daily Corrier dello Sport (he was hired as their English correspondent in 1949), as well as occasional pieces for La Stampa and Corrier della Sala.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Glanville was a member of the jury which awarded the yearly Ballon D'Or (or European Footballer of the Year award). In addition he wrote for The People and since 1999 contributed numerous obituaries of prominent players to The Guardian.

His work was seen in publications such as Sports Illustrated and the New Statesman and the prominent American Football writer Paul Zimmerman called him "the greatest football writer of all time."

During the 1960s, Glanville worked as a writer for the satirical BBC TV programme That Was The week That Was and wrote the screenplay for Goal!!, the BAFTA award-winning official film of the 1966 World Cup, to which he also contributed the commentary. As a novelist he wrote mostly about football and life in Italy, with his 1956 novel Along the Arno particularly well received by critics. He also wrote The Story of the World Cup, a frequently updated history of the FIFA tournament.

From the mid-1960s to the 1980s, Glanville organised and ran his own successful (largely) amateur football team, Chelsea Casuals, which, depending on the quality of the opposition, comprised an interesting collection of actors, artists, radio, TV and newspaper journalists, university graduates and undergraduates (mainly drawn from the LSE), friends (occasionally professional soccer players and from other sports including cricket). Anecdotes in his book of short stories The King of Hackney Marshes (1965) drew heavily on experiences gained not only from games on the Hackney Marches but also at Wormwood Scrubs playing fields, the Chelsea Hospital ground and in other South London fields!

Glanville was a lifelong supporter of Arsenal FC. He was noted for taking a critical view of many issues, often in contrast to the typical British sportswriter. Since its formation, he criticised the Premier League as the "Greed is Good League" and FIFA President Seb Blatter is referred to as "Sepp (50 ideas a day, 51 bad) Blatter"!!. Glanville said: "The World Cup has become worse and worse over the years—it is bloated. Whatever Sepp Blatter thinks he knows is only secondary to the money he wants to make." He also said there are "far too many foreigners in the Premier League" and he criticised the spending of clubs like Manchester City and Chelsea as "repugnant".

After covering England for many years, Glanville developed relationships with a few of the managers. He stated that Alf Ramsey could be "very spiky, but in the final analysis, I didn't get on badly with him and he gave people access." Glanville also mentioned how he thought Bobby Robson was "grotesquely overrated", that he was "a very inadequate manager and he failed so badly in Europe" (a reference to the failure to qualify for UEFA Euro 1984 and England's group stage exit from UEFA Euro 1988), and that nearly reaching the 1990 World Cup final was "down to luck more than judgement". However, he was effusive in his praise of Paul Gascoigne in the latter, saying he had displayed "a flair, a superlative technique, a tactical sophistication, seldom matched by an England player since the war".