No one could capture the game's charm like John Moynihan

Moynihan was a football writer with whom I began a friendship in 1982 while covering the World Cup. But I didn't realise he had a unique gift for capturing the game's charm until his books The Soccer Syndrome and Soccer Focus were published in the latter half of the 1980s, just when football needed them.

The dark clouds cast by hooliganism were parted for as long as it took to read and revisit these wonderful collections, which brought to life great players and park players - Moynihan inhabited the latter class, though David Miller's foreword to Focus mentions "his vivid attempts to enter into the orbit of Lawton" - with equal affection.

Moynihan was poet enough to take a bit of licence and it was always in the interests of a giggle.

Would you believe it? He could make football achingly funny. As no one had done before, so far as I am aware, and no one, surely, will do again.
In recent years, he wrote little but followed the game - Chelsea in particular - closely while remaining great fun in the bar of the Chelsea Arts Club, which will never be the same again because tomorrow at Mortlake Crematorium his funeral will take place.

He is worthily survived by, among others, his son Leo, another admirable football writer. I may have misheard Leo when he rang with the sad news but I do believe the old man's final flicker was of approval upon being informed that Frank Lampard had scored against Sunderland.

Let's hope it is true. And let's hope more people are now introduced to John's work because it will cheer them up and he'd enjoy that, too.