Georgie Best, Superstar

George Best, former Manchester United and Northern Ireland footballer, has died at the far too early age of 59.

I can understand the points of people who criticise Best for what happened in his later life. Like all of us, he wasn't perfect - not a saint, not a martyr. He made plenty of mistakes along the way, some of them bad ones. And he got punished for them, too, both by the courts and by the media and general public. In that sense, George did his time for the mistakes he made.

But the immediate aftermath of someone's death, especially relatively young (what age is 59 to die these days?) it's time to remember and pay tribute to the good things of a person's life. That doesn't give someone forgiveness for the mistakes they made, but it means giving thanks for the better part of their lives.

And for football lovers, the better parts of George's life were also some of the better parts of theirs. We are lucky that he came to football at a time when the cameras were common in grounds, so even those who never saw him play in person can understand just how good he was. In his playing days, he brought enormous joy even to those who's teams he was taking apart with careless abandon.

George was enormously talented, so much so in fact that no matter how much he drank and no matter how many parties he went too, he still couldn't squander it all. No team in the history of the game wouldn't find a place for him. At the end of his life, let's remember that.