Only George can save George

George Best appeared today at Wimbledon magistrates court on charges of drink-driving.

Best was stopped by police in the early hours last week for allegedly driving erratically. All in all it has been a very public decline for a man who seems to be nailed to the bottle as deftly as his foot was once glued to a ball.

By his own admission, Best is a man who has a disease: alcoholism. He is said to have become depressed by the nightly performance of his estranged wife, Alex, 32, enduring the Australian jungle on I'm A Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! while Best, 57, battles his own demons.

Best is alive only due to the brilliance of a softly-spoken surgeon who hoped his medical skills would change Best's destiny. "Of course I am disappointed," says Nigel Heaton, one of the world's top liver-transplant experts, speaking for the first time about his most famous patient. "Not for myself but because I've given him an opportunity and I've done my utmost. Mr Best has to take over from here."

Best's latest problems raise, however cruel it may sound, the issue of whether he deserved a transplant in the first place.

Heaton provided Best with the chance of a new life after a six-hour operation at the Cromwell Hospital in London 18 months ago - but it took place only because of Best's pledge not to touch alcohol again.

"I don't think it is fair to ask whether he should have had a transplant," says Heaton, "because we judge every patient individually. As doctors, we can take responsibilities only so far.

However hard we try, it isn't possible to predict whether people will, in their own heads, deal with their problems. We prolong their lives, and that is our responsibility."

He smiles sadly. "I can't stop people indulging in what you might call unacceptable habits."

In fact, Best's "unacceptable" weakness for alcohol has, if anything, worsened since the operation. One of Best's drinking friends has revealed how drastic the situation has got.

"He's been drinking as if he's got the liver of an 18-year-old,'' he said. "It's like he's starting his drinking career all over again.''

When Best left the Cromwell Hospital in 2002, the former Manchester United star vowed never to drink anything stronger than a milkshake again, claiming the operation had cured him of his addiction.

But he has clearly not conquered the psychological problems that underpin the need for alcohol that has marred his life since his footballplaying days ended.

In the months that followed the operation, Best slid back into a familiar pattern of selfdestruction, drowning his sorrows as his volatile marriage to Alex collapsed.

She threw him out of their £600,000 converted farmhouse home in Lower Kingswood, Surrey, after a series of drunken brawls.

It was subsequently reported that he had moved in with Gina Devivo, 33, who recently claimed to have lost their unborn baby.

And with every lurid tale the suspicion increases that Best was not a suitable recipient of a new liver in the first place.

Yet Heaton, who oversees the livertransplant unit at King's College Hospital in south London, and personally conducts up to 60 transplants a year, defends the decision, vigorously maintaining that it is right to provide alcoholics with new organs. He is adamant that rules and strictures are in place to try to ensure that the recipient is deserving of the life-saving procedure.

"With alcohol-related liver disease, we ensure there is a period of abstinence for a minimum of six months. We also look to make sure the patient has a determination to stay off alcohol.

"Some surprise you in their ability to stop drinking and some do not."

There is no question, however, that he now fears for Best. "I can't predict," he says, "how long anyone has to live. But in a case such as this, if you ask me whether it will be 20 years of life, I'd probably say no. If you said five years, well, I can't make that call but ..." He shrugs and smiles wearily.

Best's wife, Alex, coached him through the gruelling aftermath of his liver transplant. "Wine was the least of it," she said at the time. "He was downing huge amounts of whisky and brandy. I'm sure that's why he has damaged his new liver so much."

Heaton, meanwhile, talks in candid terms about the very real risk Best has of drinking himself into the grave. "With alcohol-related liver problems," he explains, "when patients have a new liver and start drinking again, the organ is much more easily damaged.

"Essentially, if you have a new liver, the effects of heavy drinking are exacerbated. The organ itself cannot deal as easily with that amount of alcohol because it is so 'fresh'".

He is also deeply concerned as to whether Best is taking the immunosuppressant drugs necessary to allow the liver to function properly. "If you do not follow the regime of drugs, you're not going to have 20 years, to put it bluntly," Heaton repeats.

With most transplant patients, it is acceptable, Heaton says, to drink only two or three glasses of wine a day. Best has hardly adhered to that: before the latest incident, he was bingeing daily on white-wine spritzers. "The liver has 2,500 separate functions," says Heaton, "and to drink to that degree is potentially fatal.''

For a surgeon like Heaton, the psychological help that addicts require is something he cannot supply. He talks with genuine sadness about Best and doesn't begrudge him anything.

He details how he removed Best's knobbly, diseased liver - a remarkable procedure that gave him Best second, and possibly last, chance.

"Diseased livers are green and shrunken," Heaton says. "You hold it in your hand and it isn't the prettiest of sights."

Recently, Heaton, a father of two teenage children, returned from the Alps where he had been at a skiing camp for some of the children whose lives he has managed to save. In describing his time with the children he has operated on, the comparison between them and George Best is stark.

"All doctors can sometimes overstate their importance, but watching those children who were once so ill, and seeing them now so well, is a humbling experience."

And as for the failures, the people who have let him down? In reply, he beckons me through a door to where, in theatre, a 20-year-old woman is about to undergo a liver graft. Heaton is scrubbing up and preparing for what will be a nine-hour procedure.

"We are keeping people alive," he says, pointing to the woman. "But please don't make me sound like a magician."