In praise of Glanville and those who taught us to love sport

Every World Cup it was tugged from the bookshelf, a coffee stain on one page, pen markings on another, a book as dishevelled as an old companion. Into its learned chapters we dived and invariably emerged sounding smarter.

- Rohit Brijnath

The man who wrote The Story of The World Cup (published 1993) was born a year after the first Cup in 1930. Once it was impossible to know football and not him. Now Brian Glanville, the writer, is gone, up there in some celestial field, keeping notes on Diego Maradona's cunning.

Sportswriters have heroes, too, and many of them never threw a punch or a hit a classic forehand. Their names are not Muhammad Ali but Rob Hughes of the International Herald Tribune, not Boris Becker but Gary Smith of Sports Illustrated. They did not win Wimbledon but Pulitzer Prizes, reminding us that we're all chasing many versions of craft. Lyricism lies in a goal and also in a sentence.

Once in Mecca in the early 1980s, my old friend Mudar Patherya, offered an unusual prayer. He was 19, an aspiring scribe in Kolkata and had a single wish: "God, can I please write like Neville Cardus." I smiled when he told me this because he was articulating what so many of us thought when we bent over our typewriters and banged keys like we were prodding someone in the chest.

Cardus, a sublime cricket writer even as he was his newspaper's music critic, wrote with colourful distinction. Once he described the idea of an everyday error by the grand batsman Jack Hobbs - think Lionel Messi tripping over a dribble - as "a sort of disturbance of cosmic orderliness".