It keeps on happening, the passing of sporting titans. First Garfield Sobers and now Kevin Keegan, a couple of the best, who charmed everyone on and off the pitch. Enough has been said about Keegan, his skill as a footballer, his drive, his hard work, his easy kindness to his countless fans. Not forgetting his perm, his Brut and his permanent presence on TV. He wrote a column for the Liverpool Echo when I was a trainee there in the 1970s. KK – then the sporting superstar at Bill Shankly’s Liverpool – would often come into the office to work on his piece with the sports editor, Vincent Kelly. He wasn’t happy to let it be ghosted while he did something else. He cared. And to us young whippersnappers, gawping at our hero, he was always polite and funny.
They were a horrible, savage bunch, the Argies, though they did play with an extraordinary will to win
Returning from three years at Hamburg, where he picked up the European Footballer of the Year not once but twice, he called Vin to say, ‘I think I owe you a column.’ (He had been paid for a piece he hadn’t had time to write when he left for Germany.) Anyone who still doesn’t quite understand why we all love KK should read Tony Quinn’s beautiful little homage to him, The Man Who Was King. Sobers was the greatest cricketer of all – he could do anything better than anyone else. Sometimes not necessarily the right thing. I only managed to see him bat once, in 1973, at Lord’s on the second day of the third Test against England, where he scored a magisterial 150 despite having spent the night on an Olympic-scale bender in London’s clubs. What a player!
