Sometimes, amid the waves of data and analysis which seem to drown contemporary football, you wonder whether there is still space for the genuinely unexpected. The player who arrives out of a clear blue sky and delivers to a level no-one foresaw.
It was like that with George Best, called up to the Manchester United first team for a home match with West Bromwich Albion 61 years ago, and such a bag of nerves that Matt Busby listed him as ‘reserve’, to preserve him from stage fright, when scrawling out the team-sheet in ballpoint.