Jimmy said that you just couldn’t get in enough practice and it is something I recall when I read about the demands that England’s record-breaking rugby kicker Jonny Wilkinson makes on himself. The results confirm the wisdom of every minute he spends in a perfect kicking groove.
One day, Jimmy took me round to the back of Old Trafford and pointed out a big red-brick wall with plenty of empty space in front of it. He said that when no one was around, I should spend all the time I could kicking the ball at it, with my right foot and then my left, and with as much power as I could find. Then, when I felt I was getting better, I should move further back and repeat the whole process. Often I used to go to the ground an hour early, pick up a ball and go round to the wall.
‘Teams will make closing down a player like you one of their main priorities. If you know precisely what you are doing, if you can shoot from various distances with either foot, you will always be able to exploit any chance that comes. Remember, against a good team you might get just one, but you will be equipped to take it – and win the game,’ he said.
Once, before a game against Manchester City, Jimmy talked about the special ability of their goalkeeper Bert Trautmann. ‘He’s brilliant at anticipating what you’re going to try to do. It seems that he reads it in your body language. The only chance you’ve got is if you don’t look and don’t give him any idea which part of the goal the ball is going towards.’ As was so often the case, Jimmy was right. During the match I drove through a crowd of players, but I’d looked to the left before shooting and Trautmann punched the ball away.
One of the great strengths of the teaching was that it was done in the fashion of only the most expensive of schools, it was the ultimate teacher–pupil ratio: one-on-one. Jimmy didn’t spread his wisdom across the group at any one time. He could have said, ‘Come on lads, let’s do a little shooting practice.’ Instead he always wanted to pull you to one side. There was also a harshness to his tuition. Frequently he would stop a practice session and berate you for doing something he considered stupid, an overambitious pass or some showy dwelling on the ball which surrendered possession.
He could be quite cruel in the dressing room after a game, a fact which was recently recalled by Johnny Giles, who was reduced to tears after missing a penalty in a reserve game at Huddersfield. Johnny was eighteen at the time, one of the most tough-minded young professionals you would ever see. But then he also remembers that at the first opportunity Jimmy balanced the criticism with praise for something well done.
A persistent source of complaint, from Jimmy and some of my defensive team-mates, was my eagerness to attempt the big cross-field pass which eventually became one of my trademarks. Whenever I saw a chance, I launched the long ball, often with a good result, but he was merciless when an attempt failed. As a practice game flowed around us, Jimmy would lay down one of his most fiercely upheld laws. ‘If that kind of ball is picked off, you put all your defenders in trouble. The only time you can do it is when you are one hundred per cent certain it will get to where it is intended, and how many times can you be sure of that?’
Sometimes, though, it was impossible to resist the temptation as you looked up and saw a team-mate racing down the wing, but then, if the full back read it and intercepted, your heart sank as you anticipated Jimmy’s reaction. If it happened during a match, you usually didn’t have to wait that long. Once, in a reserve game, I gave up the ball with a long pass and Mark Jones, normally so amiable and supportive, raced up to me and yelled, ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?’
Sunday morning was Jimmy’s favourite time for the most intense of our one-on-ones. As I was leaving the ground on a Saturday he would say, ‘Bobby, come down tomorrow morning, and we’ll do some work.’ Often my instinct was to say, ‘But I’ve just played, can’t I get a little rest?’ Invariably, though, I would nod my agreement because, when I thought of it, Sunday morning in the digs held no great appeal. Soon enough, I knew I would be looking for something to do.
As the groundsmen were cleaning up the pitch after the previous day’s game, Jimmy and I would change and go out on the field. Very quickly, he would have me gasping for breath. ‘At the top level you have to lose your breath, and you have to keep playing,’ he would say. ‘Every time it happens, it makes you a little stronger.’ After a while, he would set me a few exercises, usually some shooting practice, and then he would go to shower – and prepare to take me to the pub.
This was yet another branch of my education. I quickly learned that when I was with Jimmy in a pub or a bar or a hotel room, the trick was to talk about football so much that it might create a distraction and cause a pause in the drinking. Jimmy loved to compare players, their techniques and their different effects, and sometimes he became so animated that a glass of whisky or sherry or beer or, best of all, the dreaded Mateus Rosé – whose appeal could only have been the shape of the bottle – lay untouched for a little while. If Jimmy was in his best drinking form, however, this was only a precious respite. You could find yourself spending hours in the smoky atmosphere of the Throstle’s Nest in Stretford or at his home, or, when you were on the road, in some little bar around the corner from the hotel.
There was always a bonus in the company of Jimmy Murphy, though; always a feeling of excitement about the game – and the fact that you had been picked out for so much of his attention. It is the reason why among my most treasured possessions is a little beer mug from a small bar across the street from the Stoller Hotel in Zurich. It was Jimmy’s unofficial headquarters each year when we played the youth tournament. If anyone needed Jimmy, he knew where to find him – but in my case, if a game wasn’t imminent, I would probably be in his company anyway. Even today, I pour beer into the mug and raise it to the memory of the man who taught me everything he knew.
Whenever I see Sepp Blatter, the president of football’s governing body Fifa, he reminds me of the day he played against us for Zurich in that Swiss tournament, and if he introduces me to someone he invariably says, ‘This is Bobby Charlton – we played against each other you know.’ I played in the tournament five successive years and, looking back, I see how important those trips were to my dawning awareness of how a football career could fulfil all those yearnings to travel I had had in those days in the North East when I waited, breathlessly, to see where the England Schools tournament would take us.
Some time ago I had to be in Zurich for a meeting of Fifa’s football committee, and after it was over I said to Norma, ‘Let’s go down to the Stoller for old times’ sake.’ We were having ice-cream sundaes on the hotel terrace when a car suddenly stopped and a man whose face I knew came rushing up to our table. It was Werner, one of the organisers of the youth tournament, and he seemed overjoyed to see us. He said, ‘Every time I drive past this hotel, I wonder if I will ever see a Manchester United player. I do it every day, and always I look across to this terrace. Now today, here you are.’
In five years we seemed to cover every corner of Switzerland, and I often thought that the only place I knew more about was England. We played games against little town teams in the Cantons. The most memorable occasion was when we played in 1954 – the year of Switzerland’s World Cup. The rumour was that the Brazilians were coming to watch us play, but they didn’t appear at the kick off, which we thought was just as well because the Swiss lads jumped into the lead. However, they were not a strong team, and as the Brazilians arrived in their yellow track suits and filed into the stand we began to take hold of the game. Inspired, we won 9–1 and Billy Whelan made a fantastic dribble to score. I scored a couple of goals and apparently the Brazilians were impressed, particularly with Billy. We heard that they wanted to take him back to South America, but there was no doubt Matt Busby would have resisted strongly if they had pressed the idea.
Switzerland was the icing on my football cake, or maybe the cream on my apple strudel. It was the greatest adventure of the year. We rarely ventured beyond the Cantons after playing the tournament
in Zurich, but on one occasion we went into the American zone of Germany to play FC Augsburg. We were much better, winning 8–1, but there was this tough little kid who seemed ready to play us on his own. He never dropped his head, he kept battling away, and he had the look of a serious performer. Many years later, there was no reason to doubt the strength of that feeling when Helmut Haller scored Germany’s first goal against England in the World Cup final. Long after that youth game in Germany, I said to Helmut, ‘Do you remember when we played against each other the first time?’ He replied with a question of his own, ‘Do you think I am likely to forget?’
The Swiss summer was a time when I was open to so many new experiences, and one of them was going to a Catholic Mass with Arthur Powell, who was one of Jimmy’s assistants working with the youth team. He was standing outside the hotel one day, and when I asked him what he was doing he said he was waiting for someone before going to church. Though I wasn’t a Catholic I asked him if I could go along. He said, ‘Bobby, of course you can, anyone can come.’
So I went with Arthur and knelt down and said my prayers, something for which I hadn’t had a lot of practice. Mostly they were selfish prayers. I prayed hardest that we would win the tournament – that would please Jimmy Murphy, and maybe he would give me a little peace – but there was also a prayer of thanks, for so many memories that I knew would never die.
6
THE FULFILMENT OF A DREAM
SATURDAY, 6 OCTOBER 1956: it was five days before my nineteenth birthday, and six months into my National Service, and I had a date with my dreams. It was my first game in the First Division, the first time I ran out in the shirt of Manchester United, a day when it seemed that Beswick Prize Band, standing in their lumpy overcoats, were playing only for me.
I had no concern that for almost everyone else on the field and in the 41,439 crowd it was not one of the early peaks of the season; they were attending a routine football match with only one likely result – but I had arrived at the centre of my universe. For so long the prospect had come to seem like a mirage; so bright, so tangible one day that I thought I could reach out and touch it, and the next it had disappeared. Now the water and the trees were real.
Once I had run into a classroom with a miner’s helmet for a ball. Now the ball, along with everything else, was perfect. Looking back I suppose my graduation was inevitable, but it did not seem so at the time. It didn’t matter how much praise I received, how often I was told just to be a little patient, I needed to play that first game. It would calm me down, confirm my status as a first teamer in waiting. The trouble was, there was so much talent stockpiled at Old Trafford. Then, just as I was beginning to feel a touch of despair, the summons came.
Though four United players, Ray Wood, Roger Byrne, Duncan Edwards and Tommy Taylor were away with England, our unbeaten record and top position in the league did not appear to be threatened at the time my name was first written on the team sheet. Charlton Athletic had well-known South African-bred players like John Hewie, who played for Scotland because of his ancestry, and centre forward, Stuart Leary, who was also a fine cricketer for Kent, but they were having a terrible time, so bad that their veteran manager Jimmy Seed had just been replaced by the England trainer, Jimmy Trotter. They were dead last and apparently doomed.
But what did that matter to me? The band sounded no less glorious and the picture I saw when I emerged from the tunnel and into the light was as thrilling as I could ever have imagined on all the days I had fretted about when, if ever, I would get the call.
Compared to today’s Old Trafford, the pitch that welcomed me was in the middle of a football shanty town. The Stretford and City ends were uncovered and the stand across from the main one would have looked to the modern eye flimsy and ramshackle. An advertising hoarding perched on the roof announced the sponsors: Woods Contractors. Yet as far as I was concerned it might all have been lit up by the most beautiful neon. ‘Bobby, lad,’ I said to myself, ‘there are no two ways around it. You are now in paradise.’ I believed that I would have the scene fixed in my mind for ever – and so it has proved.
It is not surprising. My whole life had pointed me to this place – and this time – and before the kick off it was inevitable that I had a jumble of thoughts in my head. It really felt as if my life flashed before my eyes. I thought of all my people and I remembered the occasions which helped create such a huge load of anticipation: the trips to Newcastle and Sunderland with Jack, the sight of Wor Jackie on the run or Len Shackleton applying his sorcery, and the times when Uncle George, using his pro’s free pass from Chesterfield, took me into the paddocks at Hillsborough in Sheffield and the Baseball Ground in Derby. There had been a huge crowd at the Hillsborough game: 56,000 people who took my breath away when they filled the bowl in the Pennines with their roars – but it was the Derby game which lingered most strongly now.
Derby County versus Wolves was a legitimate peak of any season. The great Peter Doherty had left the Baseball Ground by then, but there were still unforgettable characters on the field: Jackie Stamps, Billy Steel and Raich Carter for Derby, Billy Wright and Johnny Hancocks for Wolves. It was the first time I’d seen Carter, fair-haired and handsome and full of craft and confidence. As I walked with Uncle George after the game, away from the ground down the narrow streets separating the little houses, I had thought, ‘Is this really the way it is going to be? If it is, well, it will be magic.’
The exhilaration I felt as the teams lined up at Old Trafford, and I took my place alongside Billy Whelan and Dennis Viollet in the absence of my admired friend Tommy Taylor, was heightened by the fact that I had been forced to wait so long. There was also more than a flicker of apprehension. I was playing the most important game of my life while carrying an injury.
Although during the week I was fully engaged with my army duties, as was common with many footballers I received time off at weekends to play. I had been scoring freely in the reserves, building a reputation through the match reports in the Manchester Evening News and the Evening Chronicle. My hard work under the whip of Jimmy Murphy, everyone said, was becoming increasingly evident. Wherever I turned, someone was telling me, ‘You’ll get your chance soon, Bobby. Keep scoring goals and it will be only a matter of time.’ However, when there was a first-team injury or a call from England, it was always somebody else getting the nod. Johnny Doherty, who was a very talented ball-player and seen by many as a key element in the development of the Busby Babes, Eddie Lewis and Billy Whelan were ahead of me in the queue. It made it difficult to check the rise of anxiety. From time to time I would give myself a reassuring little pep talk, something like, ‘There’s nothing to worry about, keep playing as you can, keep believing in yourself, and one of these days Jimmy Murphy is going to say to Matt Busby, “Boss, it’s time to play the boy.”’
Most of the time, though, it was hard to suppress the fear that the conversation might not happen anywhere but in my own mind. At the worst of times, I thought, ‘Well, maybe you’re not as good as you think you are.’ Every little incident in a match or in training, every little comment from Jimmy Murphy or occasionally the great man Busby, would be measured for its significance. Something I would learn down the years was that playing football was never guaranteed to make a man feel secure, but the more you established yourself the easier it was to come to terms with the demands on your confidence – and the uncertainties. That’s not to say anything could ever be taken for granted but, of course, when you are young and you still have to prove yourself in any significant way, every disappointment is exaggerated, every single setback is multiplied.
There was another concern, one I had discounted so firmly when I first arrived in Manchester and my mother was insisting I carry on with my education or learn a trade. For the first time I had seen, with my own eyes, how precarious the football life could prove. It was when my rival John Doherty was wrecked by serious injury, and it made me wonder why I should think I was different from him. After all, he had outstandi
ng ability and, like me, he had had more than enough encouragement to believe that football would be his life.
He had been troubled by his knees for some time, but one day I saw him in the dressing room when he was particularly depressed. He was showing someone the evidence of a recent operation. ‘This is what they did,’ he said, pointing to a knee which had a huge circular cut around the top. A potential cornerstone of Matt Busby’s empire, someone who had been showered with praise, was explaining why his great chance in the game might already have come and gone. He had had to submit to that primitive surgery, have his cartilage removed and the debris sluiced away, along with most of his football ambitions. A career filled with promise, in which he won a championship medal in the first wave of the new team in the 1955–56 season, was all but over almost before it had begun.
I had always said that injury was never going to happen to me, it was the disaster facing other players, but then it did – just at the time I was beginning to get more than a little desperate about winning a place in the first team.
I was undone by the weakness of my tackling while playing against Manchester City reserves. City’s big blond centre half Keith Marsden challenged me in a 50–50 situation and we both made contact with the ball at the same time. As Murphy might have feared as he saw the build-up to the collision, Marsden had prepared himself for the tackle rather better than me. My foot was hanging out and he hit it so hard I knew, instantly, that I was in trouble. My ankle swelled up immediately and there could be no doubt this was the worst injury of my career. The treatment for ankle injuries proved no more sophisticated than the cartilage operations. Ted Dalton, the club physiotherapist, slapped on a burning kaolin poultice and told me that I had to let nature take its course.
My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography Page 8