A re-worked piece, updated and prompted by Jimmy Greaves being awarded the MBE in the New Year's Honours List.

Those of us who follow football will no doubt be aware that Wayne Rooney stands as England’s most prolific goalscorer.

A Pretender in my view.

Cited in the New Year’s Honours List is one James Peter Greaves, formerly of Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur, AC Milan, West Ham and England.  He is a self-confessed lifelong alcoholic. He will maintain that you never recover, even if you don’t touch a drop ever again and that at the height of his addiction “one was too many and 18 not enough”.

Jimmy Greaves stands in 4^th place of all-time England goalscorers with 44 goals and, you might argue, is therefore 4^th best England goalscorer behind Rooney, Charlton and Gary Lineker.

But whereas Rooney’s tally of 53 goals were scored over 120 games, Charlton’s 49 goals  in 106 matches and Lineker’s 48 in 80, Greaves scored his 44 in only 57 matches.

A good strike rate for a player is reckoned to be a goal every 2 games.  Charlton and Rooney both fall below this benchmark while Lineker makes it.  Greaves’s average, by contrast, is almost a goal a game for England. At his career strike rate, if Greaves had played 120 games like Rooney he would have scored no less than 92 goals.

I am unashamedly biased in favour of the Little Master.  Memory (and nostalgia) plays tricks, of course, but my treasure chest is filled with such mental snips of him dribbling his way through the entire Manchester United defence in a 5-1 win in 1965.

The match reports in our Sunday People always seemed to end with the sentence, “Greaves, who had done nothing up to this point, collected the ball, turned on a sixpence and rifled home the winner in the 89^th minute”.

As the greatest goalscorer of his and subsequent generations it must break his heart when his grandkids ask if he played in England’s World Cup Final win of 1966.  He was dropped by Alf Ramsey having been injured in an earlier round and watched from the sidelines – this in the days before substitutes - his bitter-sweetness electrified for him for all time by his replacement, Geoff Hurst, scoring a hat-trick in the 4-2 win.

It is a puzzle why it has taken over 50 years for recognition to have come his way.