Brian Glanville was fearless, witty and hovered in the press box like Banquo’s ghost

Opinionated football journalist, who has died aged 93, loved the sport but detested much about the modern game

Brian Glanville, who has died aged 93, was what Groucho Marx might have been had the old master of the one-liner shown any interest in football. I doubt if the greatest soccer scribbler of them all – the London-born son of a Dublin dentist and an Old Carthusian expensively educated in literature and song – met Groucho (Brian knew a host of famous people), but their exchanges would surely have blistered the paint off the walls.

Nobody swore so elegantly as Glanville, who hovered in the press box like Banquo’s ghost, the gathering’s invisible conscience, ready to deliver a scathing observation, relayed, sotto voce, to a nearby colleague like a chorus baritone in one of his favourite operas.

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