Go out and put on a spectacle... Sportsmail revisits one of the final interviews with George Best as he speaks openly with Rodney Marsh about the beautiful game

By Lee Clayton for MailOnline

Published: 19:17 EDT, 19 September 2013 | Updated: 04:35 EDT, 20 September 2013

Sportsmail has delved into the archives to bring you one of the final interviews with legend George Best before he passed away in 2005. Alongside former Fulham team-mate Rodney Marsh, Best talks about changes to the beautiful game in the modern day. LEE CLAYTON went along to listen to two old pals who met up just a long pass away from Stamford Bridge.

They are two of the greatest showmen the game has ever seen; George Best and Rodney Marsh were flash and fabulous, from a golden age when goalscorers and crowd-pleasers were in fashion.

Now flair has been replaced by fear in an era where avoiding defeat is more important than putting on a show, where Chelsea’s millions have crushed competition, crowds are down and a crisis looms for football.

So what do Best and Marsh make of it all? Why has the beautiful game turned ugly… and where are the players who can put it right?

Game for a laugh: Marsh (left) and Best called for fun and entertainment, just as it was in their Fulham days

Fulham v Bristol Rovers, 1976: Marsh (left) of Fulham jokes with a team-mate as Best looks on

Rodney Marsh: Remember when we were at Fulham, Bestie? It was like the Harlem Globetrotters. The club brought me back and signed George and Bobby Moore. It was the most money I ever earned from playing football, £1,500 a week. A problem for Fulham was that my deal included a crowd bonus, any gate over 8,000 and I’d be on a percentage of the takings. So 23,000 turned up for the first match! I can still remember the look on the secretary’s face when he had to write out the cheque. The fans came to be entertained, we entertained them.

George Best: I can remember earning £5,000 a game playing for Hibs at the end of the Seventies. They let me commute from London, train on the Friday and play on Saturday. That lasted until my friends at the Inland Revenue decided to take two-thirds. That wasn’t very entertaining for me.

Rodney Marsh: They were great days and we lived life to the full. We got into scrapes, but the culture has changed in football. You have players strutting around as if they’re bomb proof, earning so much money they don’t care. You read about girls being raped, fighting in clubs and generally abusing their status as role models. Fans are falling out of love with the image of the game and the players in it.

Blessed: Best shows of his skills at a Man United training session in 1971

George Best: There isn’t a single player I would pay to watch. You can say Thierry Henry, he’s a fabulous striker, with pace and power, but a great entertainer needs to have charisma, too. Does he have charisma? No.

Rodney Marsh: That’s the difference between a good player and a great player. People can talk about Eric Cantona and Gianfranco Zola, but the last true charismatic entertainer was Paul Gascoigne. Matt Le Tissier would do something to get you out of your seat, he was an entertainer. Now nobody’s capable of producing that sort of special entertainment.

George Best: Wayne Rooney is a player.

Rodney Marsh: Yes, but he’s always got the hump! It would be great if he could play with a smile.

George Best: Most of them don’t look as if they’re enjoying themselves. Even when they score, they don’t look happy. Either that or they deliver one of those stupid celebrations that are choreographed. When we scored, and we scored a few, you’d raise your arm at the success of doing the job you were paid to do and then get on with trying to score another.

Rodney Marsh: I watched Peter Beagrie talking the other day about how he practises his back flips in training, just so he’s ready when he scores.

George Best: Who? Well he can’t get much practice using them in practice! Back flips! Rehearsed celebrations! That’s not entertainment. Getting the ball, beating people, getting fans excited, bringing them back in … I used to rush home to see Match Of The Day. Whatever I was doing, I wouldn’t miss it. I can take it or leave it now.

Rodney Marsh: You’re not missing much.

George Best: It’s the fear of losing. At the start of the season there are 16 teams in the top division looking behind them, making sure they avoid relegation. The fear starts in the boardroom, comes down to managers and through to players. The fans sense it. Why should they pay good money to watch a scared team? Their teams have no chance of winning anything and concern themselves with staying up. It’s produced negative football. There’s fear everywhere. Look at the Carling Cup results for Tottenham and Manchester City; in the old days we’d have put out our strongest side and thrashed the lower league sides, while putting on a show for the locals. Now the difference in finance between the top division and the leagues below has created panic. The Premier League has only itself to blame.

Style icon: Best poses outside his fashion boutique opened in Bridge Street, Manchester in 1967

New Year's Day: George Best, of Man United, beats Chelsea's Ron Harris to score in a 2-1 victory in 1971

Rodney Marsh: We are only six games into the season and, already, there are 17 points between the team at the top and the team at the bottom of the league. Seventeen points! That’s shocking. The game is lurking towards a crisis. It’s a dangerous time, a time for leadership from the top and for the leading managers to look to buck the trend.

George Best: It’s run from the top by people who have no idea. From the FA, to UEFA and FIFA. There’s a naivety, a lack of knowledge and understanding and packed with people who are out of touch. Let me tell you that I go to Portsmouth quite regularly because I get on well with the chairman, Milan Mandaric. I go into the boardroom and listen to directors from visiting teams analysing the game and it’s frightening, embarrassing. I should take a tape recorder for these pompous prats! I heard one say ‘who scored our first goal again?’ Coaching is poor, too; kids are told not to express themselves, just in case they give the ball away.

Rodney Marsh: Dave Whelan, the Wigan chairman, is banging on about a salary cap. Why? To bring teams down to Wigan’s level! I worry about Arsene Wenger, too. He uses words like efficient and controlled. It’s all very German. Mind you, I’d rather watch Arsenal than Chelsea.

George Best: No, I’d rather watch Chelsea. That’s the only place you can be guaranteed to see the players. They’ve bought them all!

Rodney Marsh: You’d pay to watch them!

George Best: I didn’t say I’d pay!

Rodney Marsh: Other teams have tried to copy their 4-5-1 system, but haven’t got the players. They’re not good enough to copy Chelsea. Jose Mourinho has created winning football, at Chelsea and Porto, but it’s not entertaining.

George Best: Come on, Rodney. They could break every record ever made. It’s amazing, their manager is amazing. How can they be blamed? It’s up to Arsenal, Manchester United and the rest to rise to the challenge. And I’m not sure what the Spurs and Liverpool teams of the past would make of their modern sides. Before you worry about catching Chelsea, you’ve got to score goals. No wonder fans are staying away; where is the incentive to see Liverpool when they’ve scored one goal in four games? Spurs have only scored in one of their last five.

Rodney Marsh: You can’t blame Spurs for failing to score when teams are packing midfield in getting 10 men behind the ball. It’s no good singling out Liverpool and Spurs. It’s not clever, I admit, but they aren’t solely to blame.

George Best: The point is, why should people pay £50 a ticket to watch two teams each playing one striker up front? So with 22 players on the pitch, there are only two strikers. It’s crazy. The onus is on the managers to send out an attacking formation and to tell their players to be bold.

Rodney Marsh: I remember soon after going to Manchester City, it was in 1972, and we had a game at Old Trafford. City picked a team with five international forwards, so did United. So there were 10 attackers on the pitch. Compare that to now. The worse case was Liverpool v United the other day. Once it got to 60 minutes, both settled for a point, they were more interested in avoiding defeat; there were four shots on target, they were scared of losing — and that’s two of the giants. It doesn’t set a great example, does it? It was the first 0-0 draw between the teams since the start of the Premiership. That tells a story.

League Champions: (l-r) Denis Law, Bill Foulkes, John Aston, Shay Brennan, David Sadler, Bobby Charlton, Alex Stepney, Busby, Jimmy Ryan, Tony Dunne, Pat Crerand, George Best

High life: George Best is pictured alongside his Scandinavian girlfriend Pamela Ewart

George Best: The game’s changed so much. For instance, whatever happened to the playmakers? Johnny Haynes was the first, but then you had Glenn Hoddle, Stan Bowles, Trevor Brooking, Tony Currie, Alan Hudson, the creative types. In our day, teams were made up the same. Great goalkeeper — and all teams had great, British goalkeepers then — big centrehalves, another player alongside him to kick the s*** out of you, decent full backs, wingers, a playmaker. Teams were geared to attack, to create, to score. It’s terribly sad, where’s that type of lovely passing player now?

Rodney Marsh: They’ve been killed off by athletes. Today’s game is about athletes. It started about six years ago when Arsenal signed Patrick Vieira. He became the prototype, 6ft 2in and a 15-stone powerhouse. Since then, everyone has been trying to replicate that. There is no room for the playmaker now.

George Best: The fans don’t want to see teams packed with Vieiras. He was a decent player, but he was a destroyer. He wouldn’t have become a superstar in our era. Dave Mackay is my definition of a superstar. The man broke his leg three times, but wouldn’t be carried off. He walked off.

Rodney Marsh: He limped off. Or hopped. How could be have walked if he had broken a leg?

George Best: OK, you know what I mean. These day’s so-called superstars have six weeks off with a broken finger.

Acrobatic: Best flies through the air to fire a shot at goal during a November 1965 league match with Blackburn Rovers at Old Trafford. Law and Charlton scored the goals in a 2-2 draw.

Party starter: Best looks on with excitement as he starts a champagne tower with a bottle of Moet

Rodney Marsh: TV has a lot to answer for. When Bestie was at Manchester United at 17, I was almost 19 and in my first spell at Fulham. They came to London to play Chelsea and I remember trying everything for weeks to get a ticket. There were thousands locked out; now, when Chelsea played at Wigan, there were 3,000 empty seats — and they are the champions. Who wants to go there when you can watch it on television?

George Best: West Ham have had a go.

Rodney Marsh: It’s very refreshing. I like Nigel Reo-Coker. I first heard about him when he was 15 and actually told Spurs about him. He ended up going relatively cheaply to West Ham from Wimbledon and he’s been one of the surprises of the season so far. A bit like West Ham. It can’t last, though. They will get a right good beating playing that way and then we’ll see if they carry on playing in such an attacking manner.

George Best: Let’s not knock it, though. At least they’re going for it, showing some ambition.

Rodney Marsh: The big question now is can anyone score against Chelsea? You can’t stop them winning the league, that isn’t an issue. United have become ordinary, Arsenal aren’t playing with the attacking menace of a couple of seasons ago. But I’ve looked at the Chelsea stats and in three games, against West Brom, Charlton and Sunderland, Petr Cech had one save to make; they are strangling their opponents. They could end up with a perfect record. I still wouldn’t pay to watch them, though.

George Best: It’s true, United have lost their aura. Teams fancy their chances against them, at home and at Old Trafford. They still have plenty of possession, they see lots of the ball, but it’s no good having the ball if you don’t have an end product. Chelsea must be laughing at how United are struggling to keep up with them, while the champions keep on winning. Like so many teams, United are struggling to break down negative tactics and to score goals. The game at Liverpool was proof of that.

Rodney Marsh: And if you can say that about Manchester United, a team who have always entertained, right back from the days when this great man played, to the Ferguson teams of Giggs and Beckham, then the game really is in trouble.

Manchester United: Best played for the club between 1963 and 1974, scoring 181 times in 474 appearances

Well-travelled: Best balances a ball on his knee during a practice session with the Los Angeles Aztecs of the North American Soccer League in 1976