The best of Best

George Best is listing his blessings - workwise he is busier than ever as a football pundit and he has the solid support of his young wife Alex.

These are not the haverings of a drunken man. In front of him is a cup of milky tea. He has not had a drop of alcohol for at least six months and for the first time in his life he doesn't miss it.

"It doesn't bother me. I am quite happy just having a Perrier and letting the missus have a glass of wine, which is what we do."

Clean-shaven and optimistic about the future, it is all so different from three years ago when his life seemed so empty that he even considered suicide.

He planned a last month-long bender in the Bahamas before slitting his wrists. It would be a messy job but he reckoned that with a few bottles of champagne and a bottle of Louis Xlll brandy, he wouldn't feel a thing.

It would have been a suitably dramatic finale for the bad boy of football whose antics off the field with women and drink probably filled more newspaper column inches over the years than his glittering performances for Manchester United and Northern Ireland.

He clung on but it was only when his health finally collapsed 18 months ago and he was rushed to hospital yellow with jaundice and coughing up blood, that he rediscovered the will to live. Only 20 per cent of his liver was working and he was told bluntly that another drink would kill him.

Now he takes 12 pills a day and has Antabuse implants in his stomach which make him violently ill if he touches a drop of alcohol. When he first tried them years ago he put them to the test with a large vodka. Now he is not even tempted.

"I didn't nearly die before," he says, explaining his change of attitude. "I haven't had health problems before. I have had problems with alcohol before but I have never been ill. This was different.

"The fact that I nearly died changed everything. I went the opposite way and did things that I hadn't done before. I started looking after myself and eating and sleeping properly."