It was the first of my great privileges to play in the United youth team for two seasons with Eddie and with Duncan Edwards, and also work alongside, in the first year, Billy Whelan and David Pegg. Billy had brilliant close control and was a natural goalscorer. David was a traditional winger, quick and a great crosser of the ball.
However, Duncan, of course, and Eddie to a lesser but still brilliant extent, had other dimensions. They could lift the game on to another plane and you could hear the effect they had on the terraces, which for youth matches were amazingly well filled with crowds touching 30,000 and sometimes more. That was the hard evidence of the magic Matt Busby was creating in the public mind. Make excitement, create colour, he told his young players and you only had to listen to the noise of the crowd, the expectant buzz when Duncan or Eddie got on the ball and the huge roars when those moments of promise were beautifully fulfilled, to know that his demands were being met quite perfectly. If Busby wanted United to be a work of art, Duncan was supplying the wonderfully bold brush strokes and Eddie was performing a series of inspired squiggles.
Murphy had been right, utterly right, when he first spoke to me of the meaning and the possibilities of Duncan Edwards. Every move the big lad made ridiculed the scepticism I had felt on that taxi ride from the station. He made every other player seem like just another lad on the team. He showed awesome power as he ran through the churning mud of pitches that the modern professional, so used to manicured fields which provide true playing surfaces at almost every time of year, would find hard to believe. His tackling was a series of tank traps, as ferocious as it was perfectly timed; his passing was penetrative and accurate; and, whatever the conditions and however heavy the ball had become, his heading was always immaculate in its strength and direction.
In five years of unbeaten FA Youth Cup football there was scarcely a hint of crisis for the team, even after Duncan left us for exclusive action with the first team – and then England. The only serious problem that I recall from my days in the tournament, when I collected three winning medals, was in a tough semi-final second leg game with Chelsea who, under the old England centre forward Ted Drake, had also assembled a fine squad of young players.
The brief but critical loss of certainty was provoked by Murphy’s worry that we were becoming too dependent on Duncan. He said that for once we should try not to make giving the ball to him the only solution to any problem. Maybe the pressure would mount, maybe we would find ourselves closed down, but top players should always find a way out of trouble. ‘Try to put more pressure on your own ability,’ he told us. ‘There may be days when Dunc isn’t around. Sometimes you have to solve your own problems.’
Against Chelsea in that second leg we struggled with Jimmy’s initiative through the first half. Duncan’s usual authority had been completely marginalised, and at half time we faced the prospect of going out, which was something that might just have shaken the foundations of Old Trafford. Jimmy certainly wore a rare frown as he told us in the dressing room, ‘Remember I told you not to automatically pass the ball to Duncan? Well, forget what I said. Give him the fucking ball whenever you can.’
When I took a corner in the second half I depended totally on Duncan’s ability to rise above the pack. I looked up and just thought, ‘There he is,’ and I lifted the ball so that it would drop into his path. I stood back to watch the flight of the ball and Duncan charging to meet it, defenders just bouncing off him as they tried to stop his run, and then he soared into the air and headed it into the top corner. I shook my head and thought, ‘What more can he do, what more can be said? It’s just bloody sensational.’
Not so long ago, while walking along the High Street in Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, I was reminded of another example of Duncan’s extraordinary power. It was when we were based in Shrewsbury for our National Service and we were picked for a Western Command team playing the Royal Air Force in Cosford. He was at his most masterful. His play was always filled with confidence and authority, but on this day he was particularly dominant. Jimmy Murphy had told him that he should always demand the ball as a right, and that he should do it loudly. ‘Maybe there is a big crowd and a team-mate might not hear you,’ Murphy said, ‘so make it clear that you want it.’ Against the RAF Duncan’s desire for possession was insatiable. The move that I will never forget started when he shouted for the goalkeeper to give him the ball. Naturally, the goalkeeper complied. Then Duncan passed to the full back, who promptly delivered it back after receiving the firmest order. I was next in the chain. I received the ball and duly returned it to sender. By now the RAF was in full retreat. The last act involved the centre forward. He held the ball for a moment, then rolled it into Duncan’s path. At this point he was running into the box. He shot immediately, straight at the head of the goalkeeper. The goalkeeper made no attempt to save. Instead, he ducked as the ball rocketed into the back of the net.
So, forty-odd years later I was walking down Wisbech High Street and was stopped by somebody who asked, ‘Aren’t you Bobby Charlton?’ When I confirmed it, he said, ‘I once played against you when you were in the army. I was playing for the RAF against Western Command.’ I said I remembered the match very well, and for a special reason, and then I asked him what position he played. He told me that he was in goal and – I swear this is a true story – that it was the proudest day of his life. I said, ‘But you were the only goalkeeper I ever saw who ducked a shot that was going straight at him.’
‘Maybe so,’ he replied, ‘but it was still the proudest day of my life.’ While I found this a little difficult to understand, given the circumstances, I supposed it was still another strand of the Edwards legend. One certainty is that of all the questions I have ever been asked about football, even to today, Duncan’s name has been attached to an amazingly high percentage of them. How good was Duncan Edwards? Perhaps you can say no more than that he was, at least in potential, the best who ever played.
Down the years there would be so many giants standing across my path, from Alfredo di Stefano and Pelé to Franz Beckenbauer, but there were times when I believed that after Duncan Edwards no one could have been more intimidating in his authority than Dave Mackay. Jimmy Scoular was famous for his ruthlessness and when, in a notorious incident, he yanked me back by my jersey when I was running clear on Newcastle’s goal in a match which, because of my background, had a special pressure, I came as close as I ever would to hitting somebody on the field – but Scoular was nearing the end of his career then and he never, despite that flashpoint, had the same impact on me as Mackay did.
Dave Mackay talked a lot on the field but, unlike many who did this, he never left you in any doubt that he would back up his words. He was a hard man who also had brilliant natural gifts. Once, in the 1965–66 season, we were being thrashed by Spurs and Mackay was in both overwhelming and overbearing form. Jimmy Greaves had scored an astonishing goal, dribbling around the goalkeeper, and we were feeling increasingly frustrated. We had no hope of getting back into the game, but of course you try to put on a good face against such a defeat and certainly I wasn’t prepared to surrender.
Mackay was trying to jockey me into a corner and when I pushed the ball to my left he said, a little derisively, ‘Go on then, shoot.’ I did so and the ball flew into the top corner of the net. We lost 5–1, but at least I had something at the end of a tough afternoon. Jimmy Murphy took a little comfort from this, too, because one of the things he hated most was to see any of his players giving even a hint that they were in danger of being overwhelmed by the opposition.
Such overpowering self-confidence, no doubt, was the aspect of Duncan’s play in which Jimmy gloried the most. As he proved when he came to face the cream of European football in Real Madrid, he was simply beyond intimidation. Victory was not a challenge but a right. There was no point in holding him back. The old arguments about carefully nurturing talent, and thus avoiding the risk of burn-out, didn’t apply in his extraordinary case. Those huge crowds came to see United’
s youth footballers because they were fascinated by gauging their progress, seeing them growing stronger and more mature as their experience increased, but Duncan was plainly already a finished article. It was impossible to see what advantage might be gained by sending him down the usual route. So he was allowed to skip the A team and went straight in with the old, hard pros of the first team, doing it so naturally he might have been the veteran of a dozen campaigns.
His confidence, as I saw it, never touched on arrogance; he was who he was, which meant that he was a lovely, genuine lad. When he was gone, so suddenly, the void he left behind was so huge that those who remained, from Matt Busby to a young groundstaff boy like Nobby Stiles, were bound to ask how anyone else could begin to fill it. That feeling I had in the Youth Cup tie against Chelsea, when I came to take the corner kick, summed up the impact he had on all around him whenever he played. ‘Save me, save us,’ was the silent prayer I made when I floated in the kick and, yet again, he did exactly that.
There was something miraculous about Duncan’s soaring progress into the first team. Mine, I would learn in the months that stretched into several years, would proceed rather closer to the ground. Matt Busby didn’t work much with the kids; he occasionally took us to one side and gave us a word of encouragement when he walked out to the training field – once he pointed out to me that I was physically strong enough to put a little more into my tackling – but he was happy to leave us in the hands of Jimmy Murphy and, to a much lesser extent, one of the trainers, Bert Whalley.
Jimmy, as had been so clear from our first meeting, was the man. He was ever present on the training field in his track suit top and shorts, his pot-belly protruding with the evidence of how much he liked a pint. He was on me all the time, standing close to me as a practice match unfolded, chiding me, irritating me. I suppose he was testing my patience when things were not going right, as when he stepped into my path and tripped me when I was in full flight.
It was two years before he told me that he had completed the first part of his job, which had been, quite simply, to turn me from an amateur into a professional.
The first of my amateurish beliefs he stripped away was that the best, most talented footballers always win. ‘They don’t, you know, Bobby,’ he said. ‘They don’t when they fail to understand that there are two sides to the game – and only one of them is about how well you play. Just as important is how you stop the other fellow playing to his own strengths.
‘You can stop people playing if you mark them well enough – and it doesn’t matter who they are. So you have to learn two basics: you have to learn to mark someone, and avoid being marked yourself. You have to know how to steal a vital yard with a little dummy and shimmy and hit the ball quickly and on target. You have to shout so that you can help a team-mate get out of trouble – you always have to be available to receive the ball, and that is only valuable when you let your team-mates know where you are.’ All this was new to me. He said it was easy enough to sum up. It was teamwork.
Another lesson from Jimmy was that bad players hide away in a match, exerting no influence while just waiting for the ball to bounce favourably, hoping to exploit any talent they have been given – but this, he said, wasn’t enough if you wanted to be a real professional. ‘If you want to be on the field but you don’t want to play, really play, you stand next to the man who is marking you. Better still, you go behind him. You will never get a kick. If you do want a kick, if you want to truly influence a game and show people you’re a serious professional and not someone just playing at it, you’ve got to find yourself space. You’ve got to work your balls off.’
His greatest challenge – and it was one which eventually he had to accept was a lost cause – was to get me to tackle. Jimmy carefully explained the technique which had always been a huge factor in his own fine playing career. I understood the theory well enough, but out on the practice field, even with him yelling in my ear, I couldn’t get it to work.
Yes, I knew it was right to put all your weight into the tackle, that it was the best way to avoid injury – and that the opposite was true when you went in half-heartedly and, most dangerous of all, hung your leg out. But then a match would start, and I couldn’t get it out of my head that my main job was to avoid players rather than collide with them. No matter how many times Jimmy pointed out how strong I was, and even when his argument was supported by Busby, I couldn’t budge the idea that my purpose was not to charge into tackles but await their outcome, then receive the ball and use it in the most creative way.
It wasn’t that I ever refused to make a tackle – I never consciously ducked out of that responsibility – it was just that whenever I did it I was almost invariably pathetic. Each time I failed, I thought to myself, ‘There must be easier ways of getting the ball.’ This happened to be true when you played a bad team. They would give it to you as a matter of course, but, as Jimmy kept saying with some force, my job was to learn how to compete at the highest level.
Jimmy was nearing the end of his football career when finally, if very briefly, I got it right, and quite perfectly so, while playing for England in the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. It happened in a group game against Romania. We were leading 1–0 and they were coming at us with some considerable force right at the end of the game. A Romanian was carrying the ball towards our goal area and you could sniff the danger as he moved into shooting range. I knew it was a menacing situation, and on this occasion I was also aware that there was no question of shelving the responsibility. It was me who had to make the tackle – or it was nobody. I put my foot in hard – and then something astonishing happened. The Romanian fell over and I carried the ball away.
Later I was told that as I came out of the tackle with the ball Emlyn Hughes, a squad member who was sitting in the stand, jumped to his feet and shouted, ‘Fantastic … Bobby Charlton’s won a tackle … it’s got to be England.’ It was a memorable moment for me, and a long-delayed achievement for Wales.
Jimmy did, however, see more immediate results in other aspects of my game. He made me a professional, opening up all the many hidden areas of the game for someone who had once thought he knew it all.
Week by week, Jimmy smoothed away the rough edges of my game as I moved through the Altrincham Junior League – where, with a team of new boys and trialists, we could win by as many as twenty-odd goals – and then in the Manchester Amateur League, which had teams of older men. They came from the factories, sometimes shedding boiler suits before they played, determined to shake up these fancy kids and didn’t worry about being overheard saying things like, ‘They’re only fucking Manchester United, let’s get stuck into the little bastards.’ I was given a quick passage through that kind of warfare, and also the Manchester League, where the A team performed.
One strong memory is of an Amateur League match in North Manchester. Les Olive, who I’d seen in goal for United at Newcastle when I was a boy, was playing as a centre half now. He was on the secretarial staff at the club, and after Munich he would rise to become club secretary. He was a good and versatile player, but this day he was taking some terrible abuse from the touchline. I wasn’t playing because I was needed for an FA Youth tie the following day, but in this league both teams were expected to provide a linesman, so that was my job, for the only time in my life.
I thought, very briefly, of defending Les against his critics, but then I also thought it would probably be a reckless thing to do. So, to my shame, I kept quiet and, even more disgracefully, I put the flag down quickly after signalling an offside. I did this because a very large man in a flat hat boomed in my ear, ‘You’re bloody wrong there, son.’
After that, whenever I was asked to run the line I suggested someone else would be better equipped for the job. It was, however, an insight into how seriously football can affect people, and not always for the better. I viewed it as another part of my preparation for the time when I would play the game at the highest level. We turned out in the middle of the week, in all weat
her, on all pitches and often with the most rudimentary changing facilities. It was part of what Jimmy Murphy – graduate of the Rhondda, tough professional dressing rooms and the wartime army – believed was an essential process in toughening up.
Soon, with my success in the FA Youth Cup, I was understudying the Busby Babes in the reserve team in the Central League. For Jimmy it was the time for fine tuning towards the moment when he would be able to say to Matt Busby, ‘Now the boy is ready.’ He had to be satisfied that I was gaining strength from my experiences and that I had good understanding of what lay before me if I did graduate to the first team.
As I moved through the ranks, Jimmy’s personal tuition grew more intense and more specialised. If he couldn’t teach me how to tackle, he could tell me how to avoid the close attention of players schooled in the destructive arts, how to take up the right positions to receive the ball and in the process lose a marker – and, so vitally for the profile of my future career, he could also teach me more about how to score goals.
Jimmy was particularly relentless about the need for me to shoot and his philosophy on the subject was best embodied in one of his favourite dictums: ‘You strike the ball well and you hit it hard, but you always have to remember one thing – the public will forgive you if you shoot and miss, they will not forgive you if you have the chance to shoot and you don’t. If you are running into range and you have decided to shoot, don’t look up, just hit it low and as hard as you can in the general direction – if you don’t know where it is going, nor does the goalkeeper.’
It is advice I’ve always passed on to young players, though of course, you have to be controlled in your shooting. You have to get over the ball and keep your balance and let the power flow through your body.
When I consider most of the goals I’ve scored, I see that I was following Murphy’s basic idea. ‘Keep the ball, keep it under the pressure and then shoot,’ he would say. When a shot goes wide, and another player says, ‘Why didn’t you pass the bloody ball?’ there is no point in questioning your decision. You have to remember the times you have scored by delivering the unexpected, all those occasions when you haven’t aimed for the top of the net but seen it finish up there. The basic requirement is to hit through the top of the ball so that it keeps low – and know roughly where the goal is. For me it was the most natural thing in the world.
My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography Page 7