Nature allowed me to resume training after three weeks, and though the ankle still wasn’t quite right it was something I wasn’t going to admit. I had to push on hard now because enough time had slipped by. When I could get away with it I applied pressure on my foot only gingerly, and when I kicked the ball hard it felt as though I was taking something of a gamble, but when one of the trainers tapped me on the shoulder and said that Matt Busby wanted to see me in his office there was no possibility that I would tell him that the injury was nagging on.
The summons came on Friday morning, every pro’s appointment with destiny. It was not a time of the week devoted to philosophical discussions. It was when you were either dropped and ‘bollocked’ – or put into the first team.
When I went up to Busby’s office he told me to sit down and, in almost the same breath, he asked, ‘How’s your ankle?’ Later, I learned that he had spoken to Dalton and been told that while I wasn’t perfectly fit, there was little risk that I would do any further damage if I played the following day. I told him, ‘My ankle has never felt better. In fact it’s feeling great.’ He paused, gave a small smile, and said, ‘OK, son, I’m playing you tomorrow.’
As I went down the stairs I had two thoughts. One was that at last I was a proper footballer. The other was: will I sleep tonight?
I didn’t. Not a wink. As the night wore on, and I lay in bed wide-eyed, I played the Charlton game in my head, over and over again; I visualised every possibility between glory and shame. I wondered whether (in those days before substitutes) my right foot would stand up to ninety minutes at full stretch, even though Dalton had been reassuring after Busby told me I was playing. ‘You’ll be all right, it won’t get any worse. You may feel a bit of pain, but you’ll get through that.’
When at last I saw through a gap in the curtains streaks of light in the dawn sky, I told myself that this was how it must have been for all the others. Perhaps even Duncan Edwards, who was two years younger than me when he was given a first-team shirt, had had moments of self-doubt. But then, when I thought about the possibility, I found myself shaking my head. Dunc was different. Dunc was beyond doubt. However, as light began to fill the room, I began to feel better. I told myself that this was indeed going to be a great day. I was a young lad, fit and healthy and had devoted everything I had to meeting the challenge that faced me in a few hours’ time. I could afford to miss one night’s sleep.
I suppose it was partly adrenaline that carried me through the rest of the day; that, and the sheer wonder of being part of the pre-game ritual.
I walked to the ground, resisting the temptation to tell everyone I passed that soon I would be playing for Manchester United, and every so often testing my injured foot. At 11.30 the team bus took us to Davyhulme Golf Club for lunch at midday: poached eggs and steak. Then I walked out on to the course and watched the golfers, but only with half an eye. Frequently I looked at my Swiss watch. I was counting not the hours but the minutes until the bus took us back to Old Trafford.
It had been at that golf club that Allenby Chilton, the defensive bulwark of Busby’s great ’48 team, had passed on to me a trade secret that I would hoard well into my twenties.
Chilton was a man of great authority, hard and fearless in the way of the top centre halves. Before he slipped out of the first team, when Busby – who as a young manager had treated him with much deference – announced that it was time to move forward into a new phase of his regime, Chilton was one of the commanding figures of the dressing room. Once, I was told, he had stood up in the middle of a team meeting and told Busby, who was concerned about a run of poor form, that the senior pros would sort things out: Busby was new to the job and the old guys knew what had to be done.
I had learned about the hard side of Allenby Chilton quite painfully, for a sensitive young lad, when I had burst into the first-team dressing room to tell Tommy Taylor, who I knew from sharing digs, that a boy from his part of Barnsley had joined the club. I was unable to get out more than a few words before Chilton rose from the bench and roared, ‘Get out!’ I knew better than to offer any more than a muttered apology and leave even more quickly than I had arrived. I had broken one of the strictest rules of Old Trafford and Chilton, whose aura came partly from the fact that he had survived serious wounds while fighting in Normandy in the Second World War, had jumped on me with great force.
He was, however, a more mellow figure by the time he was out of the first team and playing a few games with the reserves. Before one of them, after lunch at the golf club, I saw him swig back a drink. He told me it was a sherry and he took one before every game he played. ‘You see, son, at the end of a hard game, when you’re gasping for breath, it comes to your rescue.’ A few years later I too was spotted downing a pre-match sherry. I was not apologetic when I was quizzed by team-mates. I explained it was something I had picked up from one of United’s great players. It was an extremely pleasant trick of the trade. They were unimpressed.
Sherry was the least of my needs when I boarded the bus for the Charlton game. I wanted to be calm. I wanted to remember all that I had been taught by Tanner and Jimmy Murphy and apply it to a game which I knew, even after allowing for the problems of the opposition, would be faster and harder than anything I had experienced before. Most of all, I wanted to score – and last the full ninety minutes.
In fact I should have scored a hat-trick after we recovered, in just a minute, from the shock of Charlton going into the lead midway through the first half. Johnny Berry equalised and then I scored twice, in the thirty-second and thirty-seventh minutes. It was as though I’d never heard such cheers. The first came when I got the ball on my right foot, turned inside and, following Murphy’s maxim, battered it in the general direction of the goal. It flew in, and though my foot hurt a little it was a modest price to pay for the sweetest of moments.
I felt a predictable twinge of pain when I hit the second, but there had been no doubt in my mind when I approached the ball. It cried out for the volley and it was simply not a day when such an option could be declined. In the second half I missed an easy chance, but by then I knew that the fears that had come to me in the night had been without real foundation. I could play in the First Division, I could score – and I could feel at home.
More than anything, I suppose, I felt relief. I had come in, I had scored two goals – which was then the measure of my impact because I was seen as a strike player – and the great divide which had existed between me and men I had got to know well, friends like Eddie Colman, Duncan Edwards and David Pegg was suddenly crossed. I had moved into the inner circle; I had played for the first team.
That was the overriding feeling I had as I headed for the dressing room and the shower. I acknowledged some applause, but really I was overwhelmed by my own thoughts – and especially one: ‘You’ve played for Manchester United, you’ve done what you were there to do, you’ve scored goals – no one can ever take that away.’
The Old Man – I would never be able to call him Matt, even, many years later, after he had made a point of telling me I should do so – confirmed the meaning of the day as soon as I arrived in the dressing room. He told me a taxi was waiting to take me into the BBC studios in the city centre. I was pleased, but also a little overawed and maybe Busby saw that in my face. He said, ‘Bobby, lad, these are things you will now have to do. It is what happens when you’re a football star.’ It was another way of saying, I suppose, that I had taken my first steps to fame.
When the headmaster of my primary school had sent me into the classroom in the crimson shirt he had hummed the theme tune of Sports Report. Now I was part of the real thing and it was all a little scary. The interviewer asked me how it felt to play in the first team, and to have scored two goals. On the taxi ride into town I had tried a few rehearsals of this moment, but each time they were swept away as I replayed the game. Now I sat nervously in front of the big microphone. What could I say? How could I show that I was ready to be famous? I blurted out t
he truth. ‘Well,’ I told the nation, ‘it’s just unbelievable.’
7
NO INSTANT CORONATION
WHEN I TOOK my first hero’s salute and then walked on air into that primitive BBC studio, I tried not to forget one fact of Manchester United life – that they did not stage instant coronations at Old Trafford, not unless you happened to be Duncan Edwards. My high had been on the field and the Sports Report airwaves; I came back to earth the moment I reminded myself of the resources at Matt Busby’s disposal. I knew I had to see my performance against Charlton as a statement about the future rather than some overwhelming claim on the rest of the season.
I had to be satisfied with making a mark – and be determined to repeat it at every opportunity. I did that well enough. In the FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough I scored a quite spectacular goal against Birmingham City, the hard-tackling team who had lost to Don Revie’s Manchester City at Wembley in the previous spring. ‘Charlton Special Sees Reds Through’ declared one headline that may have helped to ensure I kept my place against Aston Villa in the final at Wembley. Most significantly of all, I was catapulted into the second leg of the European Cup semi-final with Real Madrid at Old Trafford. When the issue was already decided against us, I scored a late goal, but what mattered to me more was that I had been trusted to go on the field in the presence of men like Alfredo di Stefano and Raymond Kopa.
Though it would be a year after my debut before I could contemplate a first-team place by right, and my fight for recognition had entered its most demanding stage, there was no doubt that now it had a foundation, a conviction rather than a hope that I would be able to meet the challenge. Instead of the old frustration, there was a steady supply of encouragement. Out of the thirty-one remaining league games, I played in another thirteen, and as a result received a championship medal in the spring. In those fourteen matches I scored ten goals, including a hat-trick in the return game against Charlton at The Valley.
Another sign of growing confidence was that I was no longer bashful about wearing the club blazer presented to you when you sign professional. There had been a time when its most regular airing was in front of the mirror back in the digs, but now I wore it in the street proudly – especially when, after training, I waited to see my new girlfriend, Norma Ball, as she left her office in Lever Street, which was the centre of Manchester’s rag trade.
Mike Yarwood, who was still to make his mark as the star TV impressionist of his time, worked nearby, and many years later he reported, ‘When you started to play regularly for United and then England, I remember thinking, “That’s the lad I used to see standing in the street in his blazer, looking like a top toff – and quite pleased with himself.”’
I had no right to look so pleased yet. I would have to fight off fresh waves of impatience before I could claim my own peg in the first-team dressing room, that holy of holies which had been guarded so ferociously by an old pro like Allenby Chilton. I was still the kid who stepped in for the big men, Tommy Taylor, Dennis Viollet and Billy Whelan; when they went down, I went in, and when they came back I stepped down. However, because big injuries were inevitable, a player in my situation was guaranteed plenty of work. The more I played, the more I realised the validity of that pressure from home to guard against the worst of fate.
Broken legs were the greatest fear, and one that would be horribly realised by my friend Wilf McGuinness, a tremendous force as he moved through the ranks and into the England team before being cruelly cut down in his twenties. Ligament injuries were also commonplace. A twisted knee for Tommy Taylor, for instance, was another chance for Bobby Charlton.
Despite the hazards, though, none of my boyhood dreaming had been seriously touched. Yes, I understood now a lot more about the professional game. I grasped, finally, that behind the joy there was also cruelty and pain. For everyone who succeeded, there would be a John Doherty or a Wilf McGuinness, intelligent and, in their different ways, hugely talented players who had failed only in the department of good luck. At Old Trafford, too, there was the additional pressure of expectations which had been primed by the first decade of Busby’s insistence that the club could have players only of the highest quality.
Naturally, I studied intently the special contributions of the players whose level of performance I had to try to reproduce when the call came for me to fill in somewhere along that glittering forward line.
Dennis Viollet was slim and deadly quick. My feeling was that he was so prone to injury because he was so thin. His bones seemed too close to the surface, and this was maybe the root of my theory that it is the people who are without a little bit of fat who are most likely to go down hurt. As an inside forward, he was expected to be creative and he rarely disappointed in this respect, but it was in the penalty box where he was often unplayable. Just ten days before I made my debut against Charlton, he had left me in a state of awe when he scored four goals against Anderlecht in the famous 10–0 thrashing of the Belgian champions in the first round of the European Cup. At a rain-lashed Maine Road – Old Trafford was still awaiting floodlights – it was dazzling to see such tigerish finishing. Later there was a rare comment from the man in black, Welsh referee Mervyn Griffiths, who was as stunned as everyone else: ‘You couldn’t pick an England team to beat this United,’ he declared.
Viollet was the cutting edge, the wielder of the rapier. Matching the effect of Billy Whelan, the man so admired by the Brazilians, was a different but no less demanding challenge for me. The Dubliner was tall and nothing like as quick as Viollet. His forte was to scheme, to shape possibilities with his skill and excellent vision. Yet Whelan scored so many goals from midfield he would be a wonder of today’s game. In 1956–57 he finished with a stunning twenty-six, three more than the club’s top scorer the following season, Viollet. Wherever I looked there was competition of a daunting kind.
In those days there was a basic requirement for a centre forward. He had to be good in the air. Tommy Taylor was wonderful, but he was also superb on the ground. He was so quick, and had such good control, he could go through half a team. He was a beautiful athlete, but one who had terrible knees. For him, he admitted to me on several occasions, a professional football career meant living on a knife edge. Sometimes he would show me how his knees worked – and sometimes didn’t. The joints would go off in directions far from normal. He would shake his head, and say, ‘Well, Bobby, I just have to play.’ In his circumstances, he did it with extraordinary courage, but when he couldn’t it would be another call-up for me.
Injury was one of the aspects of the game on which you just couldn’t afford to dwell. Another was that, even though your career could be cut off at any moment, the most you could expect as long as you stayed healthy was a rise of £2 a week, despite being a member of arguably the most attractive team in the English game and playing in front of vast audiences. And even this would come only when the Professional Footballers’ Association applied pressure, drumming up publicity and even making the dark suggestion that one day it might come to a strike to bring about the abolition of the maximum wage for footballers.
However, all this was not a burning issue for me as I waited on Lever Street to see my girl, no more than it was for most young footballers. Most of us, I suppose, belonged to a breed of dreamers, working-class boys who, because of a certain ability, had been able to join a world isolated from so many everyday cares. No, we couldn’t, like the young stars of today, give ourselves financial security for life when we signed a single contract, but we could do what we loved and tell ourselves that we had been given well-paid jobs, certainly receiving more than our fathers who worked in factories and mines.
The fact that seems so odd, in these days when every player seems to have an agent agitating aggressively for better terms, is that the issue was so low on the everyday agenda of the dressing room. When in time a young player acquired a wife and had children, and had a mortgage to pay, perhaps his thoughts turned more to money, but it happened so slowly, and with
such little force, that someone like Cliff Lloyd, a former player and a brilliant secretary of the Professional Footballers’ Association, must sometimes have despaired of ever generating the kind of commitment and passion for the union cause which would eventually break the £20-a-week maximum wage.
Though in time I became interested in the PFA, and worked with Cliff, I was certainly not in the forefront of protest – unlike my young club-mate John Giles, who, before building his reputation at Leeds United, had the nerve to challenge Matt Busby over wages. I might have warmed to those impassioned speeches by the lads back at the electrical factory in Broadheath, but in my own life I was like so many of my co-workers. I took what was offered. Someone like John Giles, who I know cared passionately about the game and was deeply dedicated to improving his skill and his knowledge, would no doubt say that I had not so much bought the football dream as inhaled it, but for me it was always the privilege of playing football that was uppermost in my mind. I had that, and – certainly as I saw it then – I had good money for anyone of my age and my background.
It was only later, when I had my responsibilities as a family man and realised, for the first time maybe, how hard it was to put money on one side for the future, that I too began to ask the question that was being posed increasingly in activist PFA circles: where is all the money going – and where did it go in those incredible boom years after the war, when every ground seemed to be filled to the rafters and yet a great player like Wilf Mannion returned from England duty at Hampden Park, after being watched by 120,000, sitting on his cardboard case in a third-class rail carriage?
My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography Page 9