Jimmy Greaves has been airbrushed from history – he is the true goalscoring reference point, not Alan Shearer
English football did not begin in 1992;
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Jimmy Greaves has been airbrushed from history – he is the true goalscoring reference point, not Alan Shearer
JEREMY WILSON CHIEF SPORTS REPORTER
English football did not begin in 1992; it was simply rebranded.
And is there a career and set of records that have retrospectively benefited more from this historic airbrush than those of Alan Shearer?
It is not Shearer’s fault, but every time there is some sort of goalscoring landmark, as there was this weekend with Sergio Aguero’s 12th Premier League hat-trick and 177th goal, the reference point is the same: Shearer, whose 260 Premier League goals is a record. You will know this because Match of the Day rarely miss an opportunity to point out that their star pundit was also the competition’s greatest ever goalscorer.
Except that he’s not. Not really. Not unless you think that changing the name of a competition that began some 104 years earlier - and still keeping all the same clubs, venues, players, rules and basic formats (with two fewer teams) - somehow makes that a new competition.
Holder of most of the real records is in fact Jimmy Greaves. He scored 357 goals in 516 league matches between 1957 and 1972 for Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur and West Ham United, which is actually 74 more goals than Shearer in 43 fewer games.
Shearer, who also scored 23 times in the old First Division, is actually fifth on the real list with 283 goals.
For further context, Wayne Rooney is 21st and there are 27 players who have scored more than 200 top-flight goals. Aguero, for all his brilliance and authentic status as the top overseas goalscorer, is not yet among them.
This desire only to start history in 1992 would be more understandable if football was somehow distorted previously and the records of yesteryear were out of reach and untouchable. But they are not. Greaves scored at a rate of 0.69 goals a game - almost identical to the two best of the current era (Aguero 0.69) and Harry Kane (0.68) - and comfortably ahead of Shearer on 0.51.
Indeed, what is striking about the real list of leading top-flight goalscorers is the spread of eras and how the exceptional domestic feats even of post-war goalscorers like Ian Rush, Geoff Hurst, Tony Cottee, Denis Law and Nat Lofthouse have become comparatively forgotten. Dixie Dean's 310 goals in 362 games between the two world wars is also jaw-dropping and too easily overlooked.
The greatest casualty in terms of recent recognition, however, is undoubtedly still Greaves.
His all-time record for goals across the ‘big five’ European leagues was actually only recently broken by Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. Just stop and think about that. An English footballer - Jimmy Greaves - stands with only Messi and Ronaldo in the entire history of football as one of the leading three goalscorers in the major European club leagues.
Of the individual league records, it is also only Messi, with his La Liga record of 432, and Gerd Muller with 365 Bundesliga goals, who stand above Greaves’s haul in English club football of 357.
Greaves should be nationally revered and yet few people now seem to remember any of this, with BBC and Sky Sports (as well often as the wider media) invariably content to stick with less meaningful but more easily sourced reference points.
It is good to sometimes get the shorter-term context - and no one is disputing Shearer’s status among the very best British goalscorers - but then you wonder how an obsession with current and recently retired players impacts in other areas.
Greaves also played in the England team that won the World Cup. He won Serie A, two FA Cups and the European Cup Winners Cup. He is now very ill and, although he might not much care, has somehow never been honoured.
Shearer, with his one Premier League title and relentlessly plugged Premier League goalscorer’s record, is a CBE and there is a statue of him outside St James’ Park.
Kane, with no silverware or records as yet, is an MBE.
No one wants to wallow unnecessarily in the past and pretend that things were much better in yesteryear. But when something was, as with Greaves’ phenomenal goalscoring record, shouldn’t we also sometimes say so and ensure that is the true standard by which emerging greats like Aguero and Kane are measured?
