Peter Doherty, with those flapping sleeves and glangling legs, was an unorthodox inside forward, but give Peter an inch and he would have the ball in the back of the net before you knew what had happened, and give him a penalty kick and you might as well move back to the centre for the kick-off!

Peter Doherty was surely the genius among geniuses. Possessor of the most baffling body swerve in football, able to perform all the tricks with the ball, owning a shot like the kick of a mule, and, with all this, having such tremendous enthusiasm for the game that he would work like a horse for ninety minutes. That was pipe-smoking Peter Doherty, the Irish redhead who, I am convinced, had enough football skill to stroll through a game smoking that pipe-and still make the other twenty-one players appear second-raters. But of course Peter never strolled through anything. His energy had to be seen to be appreciated.

I recall a war-time match in which Doherty, then appearing as a guest-player with Lincoln City, turned out against my team, Bradford Park Avenue. Peter brought the ball from the half-way line, beating man after man until finally, on the edge of the penalty area, he cracked in a shot which no goalkeeper had an earthly chance of saving. Chick Farr, the Bradford goalkeeper, could do no more than dive desperately.. and pick the ball out of the net. A few minutes later the move was repeated: Doherty reached the eighteen yards line and drew back his right foot for the pay-off punt-but he didn't shoot. It was the perfect dummy, clever enough to induce Chick Farr to dive-while Peter calmly trotted on and walked the ball over the goal line. I realized that day I was on the field with a master footballer. It was a privilege.

Peter Doherty, like Sunderland's Raich Carter, was a genius of an inside-forward who, also like Carter, lost the best years of his football career to the war. Prior to the emergence of George Best in the sixties, Doherty was to my mind the greatest footballer to come out of Northern Ireland. He began life as a bus conductor and played his football part-time for Glentoran before moving to Blackpool, then on to Manchester City. He played for Derby County with great credit in the immediate post-war years, and retired in 1953 with a career tally of 199 goals in 406 games having set up countless others for team-mates.

In one game between Stoke and Manchester City when City were heading towards the First Division Championship in 1936, Doherty had been quiet but he snapped into life, making three great passes that led to a crucial Manchester City goal. It prompted Stoke's Jock Kirton to say, "That's the bus conductor in you, Peter. Your team wait an hour for a telling pass from you, then three come along at once!"

For all his genius no one really warmed to Peter. In modern-day parlance you'd say he had attitude, which I am sure played a part in his meagre haul of 16 caps over 15 years for Northern Ireland. I say meagre because he was far and away the best player Northern Ireland could call upon in the thirties. A player of his quality should have been a regular at international level, especially as Northern Ireland did not have a wealth of great talent to call upon.

Peter Doherty must surely be one of the greatest inside-forwards of all time. His skill alone would have made him outstanding, but what about his stamina, his apparent ability to go on running for ninety minutes without a pause? A miracle man, I call him. As an example to a young player, he has one great virtue: a knack of anticipating the run of the game. We can't all be born with it, as Peter apparently was, but we can try to develop it. In the case of the great Irishman, he always seems to be guessing correctly which way the play will move, so that he can join in the fun. For lesser mortals, it is a good thing to be able to foretell the direction of the next move for the reverse reason: to save our legs from doing any superfluous running about!

Peter Doherty, now player-manager of Doncaster Rovers, who graced the Ireland jersey for so long as a player with Manchester City and Huddersfield, first gave me the right idea on how to breast a ball. I have never seen his equal at that particular part of the game. In fact, I have seen few who could play the game so well at all.

Breasting a ball looks so simple that few players ever bother to perfect it, yet it is a very important factor in the make-up of the ideal player, indeed of any player. It can be the starting point of an attack.

It is the easiest thing in the world to bring a chest-high ball under control no matter the power behind it if the player knows what he wants to do. There is no good purpose to be served by allowing the ball to strike the hard bones of the chest for, that way, it will simply bounce wildly out of control. It must be caught under the breast bones and directed to the feet.

If the ball comes a little too low to enable me to nod it to my feet with my forehead, I make certain that I take it in my middle. In doing this I bend my body forward from the hips so that most of the force is gone before the ball slides down the legs to the feet. In doing that I sway my body in the direction I want the ball to take, so that when it reaches my toes I can speed on in the required direction.

If the ball comes a shade too high, then it can similarly be brought under control by jumping so as to make sure that it is still taken in the middle of the bent body.