The source is George best's own words in an interview.
That sounds like Best looking back and reflecting on the final months of his United career, by looking at how it must have seemed to his managers.
The reason it provokes indignation is that wasn't the story of his time at the club. It's not really the thread for it I suppose but as we're here I'll talk about some of the stuff I remember from listening to his interviews or watching him train.
As a kid he trained hard, in his own way. I remember him complaining about players whose first touch was poor and saying that he learned by hitting a tennis ball at a flight of stairs and trying to control that. And complaining about players who are one-footed and the hours he put in, before and after joining United, to make sure that he could use both.
As a young man he was naturally fit, as they huffed and puffed through pressups and jogs round the field he scarcely broke a sweat. Training was pretty primitive back then. The gym at the Cliff meant a game of indoor 5 a side. The weight room looked like it didn't get used for weeks at a time.
He came alive when the ball was on the field, running with it round the slalom posts, playing a game of hitting each segment of a goal painted on a wall in turn, the kickabout match and the setpiece practice.
Indeed I saw him at the Cliff doing his own versions of setpiece practice (sometimes without even a B team kid to recover the balls for him) like curving the ball into the net from a corner. It was pretty obvious he made up his own drills because he liked playing football.
That was in the early 70s, when he was already drinking too much, and staying out too late, but he was still fit enough to play 50+ games a season and be our top scorer - and he was probably one of the fittest, hardest training players we had!
Unfortunately no one's immune to that kind of abuse and the drink did catch up with him. The natural fitness faded, and the alcohol took more of a grip, and meanwhile the team got worse.
I still wonder what he would have been like in the modern game, when natural fitness would never have been enough. The warnings signs for George that his game and his fitness were suffering came too late. Maybe if he'd been struggling through training at 20, or seen his teammates getting that much fitter and faster, he'd have realised sooner and tried to do something about. Perhaps not - but it's a nice little fantasy.
