RETURN OF THE SAINT.. (& GREAVSIE)
0 Comments | Daily Mirror, The; London (UK), May 30, 2009 | by Wally
THEY go together like Ant and Dec, Richard and Judy or Hinge and Bracket.
Once upon a lunchtime, Saint and Greavsie were more than just a prematch fix on a Saturday. They were the only double act who were actually funnier than their Spitting Image puppets.
When Jimmy Greaves was confined to bed by illness, producers at On The Ball drafted in his latex caricature as Ian St John’s sidekick in the studio.
“I wouldn’t have minded, but when the bill came in from Spitting Image, the puppet cost more than me,” says Greaves in that laconic delivery which still sounds like your favourite taxi driver.
“Some people couldn’t hack it when they appeared on Spitting Image, but Saint and I thought it was a great compliment to be on the same programme as the Prime Minister and the Royal family.
“The Queen sent me a nice letter saying what an honour it was to appear on the box with us.
“When the puppets were sold at auction, I tried to buy ours – but I stopped bidding when the price for mine alone went beyond pounds 2,500, and they had lost the one of Saint.
“More than five grand for a pair of puppets? You can get two Cup Final tickets cheaper than that.”
After 17 years, Saint and Greavsie return to our screens today in a threepart Cup Final special on Setanta Sports.
Some of football’s po-faced pundits these days serve only to remind how much their irreverent humour has been sorely missed.
Since 1992, the game has been consumed by Premier League greed and bears little relation to the era when Saint’s basic wage was pounds 35-aweek with a pounds 1 bonus if Liverpool pulled in more than 28,000 at Anfield.
And where Greaves used to dribble round five defenders and 20 divots to score for Tottenham on a lunar landscape surface, now football is played on bowling greens instead of sand, snow and mud.
“It’s still a source of amazement that Bill Nicholson’s Spurs team played the quality of football we did because every pitch in those days had its own character,” he says
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