Brian Viner: Time to honour one of British football's greatest heroes

'In my lifetime I can think of no player who has attracted so much respect for the game in Europe'. How shaming it will be if John Charles is honoured more in Italy than here

Of all the letters and e-mails which landed in my chilly Herefordshire garret last week, two in particular seem worth sharing with you, albeit for very different reasons.

One was a press release from Frank PR, detailing the stunt planned by the players of Scarborough FC, who in the event of one of them scoring against Chelsea in the fourth round of the FA Cup on Saturday, would drop their shorts and undergarments, spelling out on their backsides the name of Zoo Weekly, a new men's magazine hungry for publicity.

All sorts of images sprang to mind, not least that of a line of bottoms wrongly lined up and displaying a message such as 'woozy leek'. As my colleague Tim Rich pointed out in these pages on Friday, footballers have a hard enough time forming coherent walls, without having to worry about spelling.

But as Tim reported, the stunt was vetoed by the Football Association, whose decision-makers are themselves quite capable of looking like a bunch of silly arses, but in this instance got it absolutely right. The agent Eric Hall, who had brokered the deal between Scarborough and Zoo Weekly, promptly accused the FA of a huge sense-of-humour failure. But anything that irritates Eric Hall is likely to be good for football, as was the case here.

Scarborough did not score, as it turned out, but they had a good shout for a penalty. Had the buttock-unveiling scheme stayed in place, I, and I suspect tens of thousands of others who think that football has lost quite enough dignity without collective mooning becoming part of goal celebrations, would have willed them not to score. And that would have been a shame. Support for the underdog is a hallowed FA Cup tradition. Eric Hall nearly dealt it , if only for one match, a mortal blow.

Speaking of mortality, I also had a letter last week from the Reverend DG Williams, of Worcester, who urged me to support his campaign to have John Charles knighted before the great man finds his way to the celestial penalty-area.

Rev Williams read in the papers recently that Charles, who has been ill for a number of years, had been admitted to hospital in Milan. He has therefore redoubled his efforts, which already included a letter to the Prime Minister.

'If the honours system has any valid place in sport at all, surely JC should be knighted while still with us,' Rev Williams wrote. 'In my lifetime I can think of no player who has attracted so much respect for the game in Europe. Skill and sportsmanship have seldom been combined to such a marked degree.'

I am too young to have watched John Charles in action. Those such as Rev Williams who are not, all say that he was magnificent. I know that 'Il Buon Gigante' is still lionised in Turin, where he scored 93 goals in 155 league matches for Juventus, never receiving so much as a caution. He signed for Juve in 1957.

Can you think of any other British footballers who have played abroad and might still be worshipped there 47 years later? Gazza? I doubt it. Gary Lineker? Possibly. There was, after all, serious talk of erecting a statue of him in Barcelona after he scored a hat-trick against Real Madrid. David Beckham? It could yet happen.

But with this ailing Welshman it is fact, not hypothesis. And how shaming it will be if, when he does finally take his leave of this world, he is honoured more in Italy than in the United Kingdom.

Rev Williams is bang on the money. Charles should be knighted forthwith, and by the Prince of Wales, if just to nail the idea that it is only English footballers of the black-and-white era - Sir Stanley Matthews, Sir Tom Finney, Sir Bobby Charlton, Sir Geoff Hurst - who get the tap of steel on the shoulder.

Still, the fact that there are as many sporting knights as there are at least dampens another suspicion of mine, which is that the Establishment holds sport in negligible esteem.

It dampens the suspicion but does not extinguish it. Okay, so the Queen posed for a photograph with the England rugby union team. Big deal. Far more illuminating is the list compiled by Saga magazine (edited by Winston Churchill's granddaughter Emma Soames, lest you wonder whether Saga can be considered representative of the Establishment) of our 50 greatest living sages.

There are lawyers, scientists and clerics aplenty in the list, yet only one person associated with sport: Mike Brearley. And but for Brearley's subsequent career in psychoanalysis I wonder whether even he would have made it? Where is Sir Bobby Robson, Dame Mary Peters, Ron Greenwood, Ted Dexter, Peter Alliss? Surely they are no less sagacious than those 'sages' Maurice Saatchi and Suzy Menkes? Clearly, the Establishment owes sport more respect, and John Charles a knighthood, although that argument could have been scuppered by 10 Scarborough bums.

b.viner@independent.co.uk