GEORGE BEST was the greatest footballer that ever lived. Let us be perfectly clear about that, no matter what other judgments we make about a life that mixed the beautiful with the banal in dreadful and ultimately lethal ways. Best was the best I have seen, the best anybody has seen.

It was a very pure kind of brilliance. He was football. He was the essence of what football is. He lacked some of the greatest footballers’ ancillary talents — the ability to make an entire team an extension of your nature and your skill. This was the talent of Pelé, of Diego Maradona, of Franz Beckenbauer. Best’s genius was not with team-mates, or matches, or tournaments. It was a talent distilled to an almost infinite purity. It was genius with a ball. And with opponents, of course. But most especially with a ball.

Opponents were there, it seemed, not to stop him but to showcase his art. Pat Crerand, a former colleague, used to claim that one of Best’s markers was taken off suffering from “twisted blood”.

There was nobody like him with a football. Ever. People thought he was left-footed — we like to think of genius as something sinister, after all — though in fact, Best was a natural right-footer. But by a combination of work and genius, he made himself as good, if not better, with the other foot. He used to speak about a game in his native city of Belfast which he played with a boot on his left foot and a plimsoll on the other. Scored six with the booted one. Of course.

His genius was an aspect of his neuroses. It was Carl Jung who said that his duty as a psychologist was to help men of genius to keep their neuroses. Best’s extraordinary skill was as much a reflection of his singular nature as Van Gogh’s was of his. And self-destruction was an aspect of both those geniuses. Van Gogh did it quickly; Best’s way was slower. But every bit as certain.

At least Van Gogh left paintings. Best leaves only memories and grainy film clips. His was a genius for the ephemeral, for the infinitely trivial. This is not to devalue it. It was beautiful and perfect and it has gone and left us unsatisfied. What more could anybody ask for?

Please note, these are not the thoughts of someone who sentimentalises the past. Football has changed, and vastly for the better, since Best’s day. But there has never been anybody as good as Best and there never will be. It is not possible. Best exhausted the medium.

One of the ways in which football is better is that flagrant kicking, bullying and fouling is now punished by yellow and red cards. In Best’s day, footballers were allowed a degree of physical assault that is shocking to behold when you watch with modern eyes. But Best rose above it. He was not only the best, he was the bravest. He loved to challenge an enforcer, to stand in front of him, tawny ball at his feet, and to beckon. Come on. Have a go. I’m here, kick me. Or the ball, if you must.

That was how Madame Tussauds sculpted him: in his matador pomp, two hands beckoning. You want me? Then come. And then the lunge, and Best had a trick that no one else could bring off. He used to disperse all the atoms of his body and, a nanosecond later, bring them back together on the far side of his opponent. That is surely the explanation. No other fits the bill.

Best had a talent for football that bordered on love. There was something voluptuous about the nature of his skill. He used to talk about getting physically aroused before matches, an extraordinary confusion of battle and art and love.

And, of course, he led the life of a voluptuary when not playing. He was not, however, the classic macho footballer. He loved women and the company of women, as well as the simple fact of conquest. Booze and birds. Booze and birds and football: many a male’s hobbies, but Best carried all three to memorable excess. But I don’t want to dwell on that. I don’t want to talk about how he was the fifth Beatle, and the first footballing style icon, and the first footballing love-object, and the greatest of all footballing rebels.

I don’t even want to talk about where it all went wrong. This was, of course, the immortal question asked of Best in a hotel bedroom by a waiter serving him champagne as he entertained Miss World after a head-spinningly wonderful night at the roulette table.

Never mind where it all went wrong. Of course it all went wrong: it was far too fragile a talent not to go wrong. The real question is, where did it all go right? How was it that such extraordinary skill, such beauty, such perfection, could arrive to a boy and be developed to that level of perfection and beauty in a man?

Football is not an art, but Best made it look like one. Opponents do not co-operate with footballers, but Best made them look as if they were doing so. He made football seem not a battle but a dance of joy, even though it is nothing of the kind. For football, read life.

Best was a glorious thing to behold and he paid the price for it all his life. But we — we who watched, we who saw — we are the ones that had the joy of him. And it was wonderful. It was the best: nothing less.

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