Is there anything new to be said on the subject of Manchester United’s fallen legend George Best? Certainly not in this sentimental hagio-documentary, which trundles out the same old ideas, without anything fresh in the way of context or perspective.
There are one or two nice contributions from the interviewees, but Bobby Charlton or Denis Law are not in the film. Anything about Best has to answer the hotel bellboy’s apocryphal question: “Where did it all go wrong?” – although it is a measure of this film’s piety that this anecdote is primly unmentioned. Probably rightly, the documentary puts it down partly to Matt Busby’s retiring as Manchester United’s manager in 1969; without his wise and fatherly guidance, Best succumbed to a tendency to indiscipline that was the flipside to his intuitive brilliance, and to a weakness for drink and the even more addictive celebrity buzz.
Nowadays, the professional sports world knows more about alcoholism, about depression, about career management, although these things don’t seem to have helped Paul Gascoigne, and that obvious parallel is unmentioned. This looks like something marketed as uncritical Man U fan memorabilia.
