Goodbye Stan Bowles- the last of football's great playmakers.

 Goodbye Stan Bowles- the last of football's great playmakers.

With the death of Stan Bowles and the loss of almost the entire squad of England's 1966 World Cup winning heroes it would be easy to become morbid and morose, even despairing. The fact remains that football has almost lost its entire backbone in recent years and for those of us who grew up with the revered likes of Stan Bowles, Tony Currie, Frank Worthington, Rodney Marsh, the incomparable George Best, Alan Hudson and too many to mention let alone miss, their replacements or like may never be found.

Yesterday though Stan Bowles, a masterful playmaker of the highest quality, died peacefully at the age of 75, a body exhausted by the severities and rigours of smoking, drinking and late night boozy saturnalia. The truth is of course that Bowles burnt the midnight oil and then disobeyed all the laws, rules and regulations that he must have found so oppressively restrictive anyway. Bowles loved the night life and he loved to boogie.

Bowles embraced rebellion and non conformity in the way that most of his aforementioned contemporaries had done so openly. Bowles gained enormous pleasure from innumerable packets of cigarettes, betting on horses quite brazenly before a big match and doing the kind of things off the pitch that the moral majority would have found quite outrageous. He read football programmes when his team were about to take a corner, then resorted to the kind of debauched behaviour that local vicars would have found disgusting and disgraceful.

Firstly at Manchester City and then with much more distinction at Queens Park Rangers, Stan Bowles was the personification of the 1970s misfit, a bad boy who flaunted his flamboyance shamelessly on the pitch and then tried to pretend there was nothing wrong with his off field conduct. He was simply expressing himself quite beautifully and illustrating the game with some of the most attractive designs it had ever seen. Bowles was a natural expressionist, the clown prince, troubadour extraordinaire, the court jester who was convinced that life was to be enjoyed to the full.

At times though Bowles would become unmanageable to such an extent that certain managers simply tolerated his idiosyncrasies, the annoying quirks, the bad habits, the incessant refuelling and then the desperate attempts at reinvention on the pitch. Gordon Jago and Dave Sexton, his patient managers at QPR, must have been tearing their hair out at Bowles complete lack of self restraint, the tomfoolery, the comical confrontations with referees like Pat Partridge, Gordon Hill and Clive Thomas. Bowles must have thought the game was some hilarious joke and laughed at incessantly.

During one unforgettable season at Queens Park Rangers the West London side came agonisingly close to winning the old First Division, the League Championship in 1976. With the final two and three matches left to play in the season, Rangers were still in contention to clinch the trophy for the first time in their history. But then Liverpool, who were almost seasoned campaigners when it came to winning the First Division and League Championship, went to the Molyneux before thrashing Wolves 3-1 with goals from those Kevin Keegan and John Toshack halcyon days of wine and roses.

But Rangers and Bowles were there at the finishing line and almost sampled the most historic moment in the club's history. They finished as runners up to Liverpool but were agonisingly close to an achievement that may have changed everybody's perception of the club. Sadly, the Rangers team of Gerry Francis, a born leader of  men and Dave Thomas winging it with speed and blistering acceleration, were a side of all seasons, always positive and admirably ambitious.

Bowles though became disillusioned with the game and by his mid 30s the trickery and technique was still there but the immaculate ball control had now gone, the first touch deserting him almost alarmingly. He could still open up the opposition with an almost effortless nonchalance, a through ball that left most defenders gasping for breath and wishing they hadn't bothered chasing in the first place. The vision and instinctive awareness of his colleagues had always been in his mind, but the bigger picture was now just blurred and distorted by smoking, boozing, performing as the ultimate playboy and then blowing his wages on the cheap fripperies, the expensive coats, the flared trousers by the dozen and general, unnecessary ephemera.

By the time Bowles had joined Leyton Orient or Orient as they were known at the time, Stan The Man had now become a sad parody of his former self rather like the distinguished actor who just refuses to learn his lines. There was a lingering air of creativity about his game but poor Orient were simply offering Bowles a brief extension to his career and the Os just indulged him. Soon the glamour and grease paint had vanished. Bowles bowed out of the game and into a wilderness from which there would be no return.

In his final years Bowles would be swallowed up by the early stages of Alzheimer's disease which would show every sign of deterioration quite rapidly. In recent years there was the fund raising testimonial at Loftus Road where the great and good paid effusive homage to Stan Bowles. We remember though the wasted talent at international level when Don Revie just thought Bowles was too much of a loose cannon for England and more of a liability. There were five caps for England but most of us had tragically forgotten all about all those appearances.

Brian Clough, perhaps one of football's greatest managers, spotted Bowles unique ability to change the direction of a game with one incisive pass and feet that were sprinkled with stardust. Nottingham Forest would gamble with Bowles rebellious streak but once again Bowles went on his famous wanderings and although added to one of Forest's European Cup squad, never really seized the moment.

And then Bowles, by now handicapped by his now terminal disease, sporadically accepted the invitation to the after dinner circuit of speeches and stories. But the energy had been drained from him and Bowles looked more frail and weaker every time the camera snapped at the wrong time. Yesterday football lost another lovable rogue, a dashing cad and bounder, one of its many charming characters. He may well have been the last since the football room is getting emptier by the week, month and year. Of course we'll miss you Stan Bowles. That goes without saying.