The fact that I went directly from Germany to the North East had nothing to do with my medical situation, at least my physical condition. I had a cut on my head, but the stitches could have been removed anywhere. What I was suffering, I know now, was a great weight of grief. For a little while, I just couldn’t get out of my head the enormity of what happened. Looking back at myself in those days, I see that everything had changed for me profoundly. Before the accident I was always advised by players who I respected so deeply. I was the kid asking the questions, and then, suddenly, it was different: I was supposed to be the experienced hand. I’d played against Real Madrid, I had played in a cup final and people were talking about me as a future star of England, but if everyone thought I was experienced, that I had grown quickly into the role of an elder statesman, the truth was that inside there was no difference. So much more might now be expected of me, on and off the field, but, when I looked at myself, on the inside I was still just an ordinary lad. I wasn’t a captain, I was a young player still learning my trade.
All that had happened to me was that from the moment I sat beside Uncle Tommy in the stand at Old Trafford I was obsessed with the idea that this football club would indeed get back on the road to progress; it would grow strong again. I couldn’t advise Jimmy Murphy on his next move into the transfer market; I couldn’t come up with some tactical masterplan, but I could respond to suggestions I heard that the club might go under, that the effect of Munich would not in the long run be a point of defiance, an inspiration, but the start of a relentless decline. I could play better than I had ever done before. I could carry with me the memory of Duncan and Eddie, Roger and Mark, David and Tommy, and Billy and Geoff every time I went on the field. I could help us avoid relegation, which would have been the first terrible suggestion that we might be on some irreversible decline. I could help drive us towards Wembley – and the chance to bring some joy back to the United fans who had seen a team that had grown so huge in their lives die before their eyes.
I could help to prove that there was indeed life left in Manchester United. I felt that belief course back through my body and my heart.
12
RESURRECTION
THERE WAS NEVER a morning when I woke up with a great conviction that my destiny was to be a vital figure in the resurrection of Manchester United – it was just that I knew I could play a part, and that I had this tremendous belief that the job could be done.
It was inevitable, I worked out, that those of us who had survived the crash would be looked up to in a certain way, as though our escape in itself had given us a certain aura. That didn’t have to weigh us down. It just meant that we had to play at the peak of our ability every time we went out on to the field – and also be grateful that our survival in the FA Cup had given us such a clear focus for our effort to get some life back into the club.
Above all, the situation was a reminder of something that I had learned very early as a young pro. Football allows you to detach yourself from everything that is going on in other parts of your life. You have a job to do, a position to fill, and in those weeks after Munich there surely could not have been a finer therapy. In trying to record your life as accurately as possible there is maybe a temptation to compartmentalise all of your experiences: Munich was rock bottom; the march to Wembley in the wake of that experience was uplifting and liberating, a new dawn.
Well, of course, life isn’t parcelled up so neatly. Munich hadn’t made a mature philosopher of me overnight. I was still just a kid who had had a bloody awful experience. However, there was no doubt about the value of the therapy that came with our involvement in the cup. It was as good for the players as it was for the fans. We had something to play for, and they could go back to their old places in the stand and start making new dreams for a new team. Looking back, I see that this feeling of renewal, the idea that something could still be made out of the future, did more than anything to get me over the worst of the memories.
For so long I had felt so lucky to have arrived at such a great club alongside great players. Now many of my friends, and the greatest of those players, had gone, but I still felt lucky for a different reason. As we worked towards Wembley for a second time, with the help of new men, Ernie Taylor and Stan Crowther, and young players like Alex Dawson and Mark ‘Pancho’ Pearson, I was able to come increasingly to terms with my dreadful experience. It was a bit like running through a dark tunnel with the encouragement of a speck of light ahead.
Inevitably, there were days when, without the adrenaline accompanying a big cup game, I would find myself back in some of the old confusion. Who could really explain what happened? Not a priest, not a psychologist, not Harry Gregg, who lived through all of it with maybe the most open of eyes. I was lucky, compared to Harry and Bill Foulkes – I saw only flashes of the horror. I was cosseted away from the worst of Munich. God knows what they witnessed, terrible, terrible things I have no doubt, but even they couldn’t answer that nagging question that wouldn’t go away: how could I be fifty yards away from the plane, alive, still attached to one of those big seats that were, when the house was hit, presumably just flung out from the middle of the plane where Dennis Viollet and I were sitting? I don’t know and I’ll never know. I can only go back to that amazement I know I will always feel about the fact that Harry and Bill were able to help people. This will always underpin my memories of that time when I seemed to have awakened to a kind of hell, with the Old Man groaning in pain and one team-mate lying near me, unmarked but plainly dead, whose identity, for reasons I’m now not completely sure of, will always be my secret, locked away very deeply.
Perhaps in other circumstances such a trauma would lose some of its rawness, because in the end I suppose time cures almost everything as it adds new layers of experience down the years, but with Munich this could never be so. It was a public matter, and the old who remember it want to talk about it as much as the young who have only read about it in books or seen it on old, grainy film. There is also another truth that cannot be denied. Munich changed not only those who were involved in it but also the club and the fans. United was no longer just a great football club: it embodied that experience, it was a dream that needed to be reawakened.
I think it helped me that I was always aware of my good fortune. It wasn’t something I ever had to work on, and it helped me to survive – as the club survived – because I felt a responsibility that went beyond my own concerns. It was not, anyway, as if I lacked any examples in the matter of fighting on through the worst of situations. Ultimately, there was the example and the resolution of the Old Man.
When he came back to Old Trafford his face was deathly pale and you could see all the pain etched so deeply into it. He had seen so much of his football revolution and, much more importantly, so much of his life disappear in the flames of Munich. He looked around the dressing room and you could see in his eyes how hard it was for him to note all the missing faces. Perhaps inevitably, tears came. He said that for the moment Jimmy Murphy was in charge, but he was always thinking of us and the job we were tackling so well. I think beyond everything, he felt guilt that it was on the business of his great football dream that his boys had died. He had thrown them into big-time football years ahead of their time, and they had not let him down. His eyes played across the faces of his new team, but they didn’t seem to engage in real contact. It was as though he was looking for a point of recognition, something to reassure him that really the horror hadn’t happened.
He left us with his favourite saying: ‘Enjoy your football, boys, express yourselves. Let your talent out.’ It was the classic belief that he would take to his grave nearly forty years later: a feeling about the way football should be played, the point of it, and when he returned as the master of Old Trafford, after convalescence in Switzerland, it would once again be at the centre of all he tried to achieve.
In the meantime, there was the job of winning the FA Cup, the league having slipped, predictably, out of our grasp with a st
ring of defeats. It was a task Jimmy Murphy tackled with all his usual ferocity.
The tie against Sheffield Wednesday had been won on the greatest tide of emotion I would ever be part of in a football stadium, but it was a little different in the sixth round at West Bromwich. They were a strong and polished side, determined not to be caught up in the national wish fulfilment that United would rise up quickly to glory after the terrible events in Munich. In this, Albion were helped by some big-name players who were particularly keen to stick to the agenda of their own ambitions, notably wing half Bobby Robson, right back Don Howe and Derek Kevan, a big, strong centre forward who was in the process of bustling his way into the England team.
Jimmy Murphy’s desperate attempt to strengthen our team in the leeway provided by the FA’s waiving of the normal transfer regulations, had found a glint of gold in the signing of little Ernie Taylor. He might have been five years down the line from his massive contribution to the ‘Matthews Final’, but he still retained a wonderful sharpness of thought and skill. He gave us the early lead, then helped to push us back in front when his brilliant shot smacked against the crossbar and rebounded into the path of young Alex Dawson. Albion had been helped by a dubious decision by referee Kevin Howley, who awarded them a goal which Harry Gregg, in his inimitably passionate way, insisted had not crossed the line. We were five minutes away from the semi-final, but then Albion, urged on by the voluble Robson, never a man to comfortably accept defeat, fought hard to earn a replay.
There was no capping the rising passion. Four days later, more than 30,000 fans tried to gatecrash Old Trafford. This second match was really hard, and we were having to stretch ourselves a little now because adrenaline can carry you only so far; in the shortfall, there is a lot of painful running to do, a lot of sucking in breath and telling yourself that you have to find a little more in yourself.
West Brom were over-running us for most the game, but I kept thinking, ‘Well, maybe we can hang on, perhaps we can take some half-chance and nick it.’ We had to do that because I felt that they would be too strong for us if it went to a third game; most of the time we were hanging on the ropes. With a couple of minutes to go, the ball came to me as I ran into what I thought was a likely position out on the right side, something I had been given the freedom to do in the new set-up. I knocked it past the Albion left back, Stuart Williams, in pursuit of what Jimmy Murphy said was one of an attacker’s optimum situations – the ball in your control on the dead-ball line.
‘Get on to the dead-ball line,’ he would say, ‘because when you are there the opposition panic. They’re going in the wrong direction and you can’t be offside.’ Ideally, you have time to take a little look, but I was going too fast into a position about ten yards away from the corner flag. I had to be first to the ball because the referee was about to blow the final whistle and this might be the moment we could shape so much. I was able to answer another Murphy demand: ‘Catch the defender on his heels, and by the time he’s turned you’re gone.’ I was. When I did look up, I saw a single red shirt amid a clump of blue-and-white ones. God, I drove that ball in, putting into it everything I had left, and as I did so Colin Webster found a patch of space and turned it into the net. The crowd went mad; we all went mad; and when Bobby Robson was moaning after the match, I thought to myself, ‘Well, we were brave, we did stick to the job.’ Bobby was complaining, ‘We got bloody nothing from the referee, we didn’t get the bounce of the ball, and then they go and score right at the end.’
Jimmy Murphy was as ecstatic as the crowd because he had received from his players the gift he treasured most in football. His team had played beyond themselves and their physical resources because they knew, when they measured the odds that had piled up against them, that this was an opportunity that would not come again.
For the semi-final at Villa Park we drew a Second Division team, but one with some very special ingredients. Fulham had the magnificent general Johnny Haynes, Jimmy Hill, an eccentric but spectacular winger Tosh Chamberlain, a fine goalkeeper in Tony Macedo, the famous former striker, now converted midfielder Roy Bentley, an England left back Jim Langley, and a young, quick, right back who was taking his first strides towards the 1966 World Cup final – George Cohen.
This was a team with the balance of enough talent and enough experience to exploit the tiredness to which we had become increasingly prone with all the emotion that had gone into our performances in recent weeks – and which was a big factor when, just three days after our replay win, West Brom returned to Old Trafford and thrashed us 4–0 in a league match.
George Cohen recalled many years later that after the first semi-final match, which ended 2–2, I went up to him and said, ‘Well done, son,’ which I presumably intended as a gesture from a mature old pro to a young contender. I was, after all, a full year older than George. He had played well, but then so had I, scoring two and crashing one against the crossbar. In the replay at Highbury, Fulham had the fate I had feared for United in the quarter-finals against West Brom. They had had their moment, but it passed. Young Dawson, a powerfully built lad who maybe suffered down the road from the level of effort he was required to make through the months after Munich, put us in control of the game with a hat-trick. Then, after Fulham had fought their way back to 4–3, I was able to make the game safe in the ninetieth minute. I ran on to a ball on the right wing and hit it in my stride. It flew into the top corner. Somehow we had made it to Wembley – forty-nine days after the Munich air crash.
It was perhaps our finest moment since the tragedy, and in some ways the greatest achievement of my friend and my teacher Jimmy Murphy. He hated the limelight and as the Old Man recovered in hospital and then at home, he made it clear that he longed for the day ‘The Boss’ returned. Matt Busby was the leader; Jimmy Murphy was the faithful helper and minder. No manager ever had better cover for his back, no assistant was more selfless in his work for a club, its manager and its players.
Jimmy hated some of the jobs in football. He was happy to work in the rain and the wind, hour after hour, with some young player he thought of as a real prospect, but he could not bear to tell a player that, in the end, he had failed his test as a professional. That, he said, was a manager’s job. Jimmy didn’t want to hire or fire, he didn’t want to impart news that he knew would cast a shadow over a young person’s life. He was a teacher, a passionate and sometimes unscrupulous motivator, but if you wanted somebody to do the nitty and the gritty and the dirty of the manager’s job you had to look elsewhere. The problem, though, was that United couldn’t do that when Matt Busby lingered between life and death. Murphy was Busby’s right arm and now that limb had to come into play. It did so magnificently. The background enforcer stepped into the harshest of light.
One of his shrewdest decisions, and a big reason why we were able to make our run on Wembley, was to more or less withdraw his young team from the post-Munich cauldron of Manchester. He realised that there was nowhere a young player could go in the city without feeling the great build-up of emotion and expectation. So much of it was meant kindly, but in the end pressure is pressure and Murphy rightly concluded that somehow it had to be dispelled.
His solution was to take us on frequent trips to Blackpool and the familiar, and relaxing, environment of the Norbreck Hotel. There we trained, walked by the sea, and had saunas which seemed sometimes to be doing more than drawing out sweat and impurities: you could sit in there and look at the wooden walls and feel cut off, utterly, from a world that at times seemed to be too close, too demanding. It was as though United had become too popular, too much a piece of public property.
This was still the feeling when we travelled down to London for the final. Every newspaper headline, every broadcast named us as the nation’s team – everywhere, that was, except Bolton. Five years earlier Bolton Wanderers had battled against such country-wide partisanship when they came close to wrecking the romance of the ‘Matthews Final’. This time they went a step further. They beat us 2�
�0.
Bolton had played hard but also well, and we had no bitter complaints. The Old Man was frail and grey on that spring day, and you could see on his face what an effort of will it had required from him to come to the famous ground and re-immerse himself in the passions of a big football match. He thanked us again for our performances and our willingness to give everything we had to the club. His words touched my belief that in a way the result of the cup final had been irrelevant. The important thing had been to get to Wembley. In the rush of games that followed the suspension of our season, and which we mostly lost, slipping to a final position of ninth in the league, the idea of getting to the final was the spark, the link with the past, and the inspiration.
The European Cup also went the way of the league. I flew off with England on their summer tour, while my United team-mates travelled by train to Milan to defend their 2–1 first leg advantage against such brilliant individuals as Juan Schiaffino of Uruguay and Nils Liedholm of Sweden. The Old Man stayed at home to continue his recovery and hear, with a sigh, that his survivors, his new boys and his veteran stop-gap signings, had gone down 4–0.
So we had to settle for the Wembley experience which, as symbolism went, was potent enough. When the sirens blared on the field in Munich, Harry Gregg, Bill Foulkes, Dennis Viollet and I had been confronted with a future that made no sense and gave no encouragement. We grieved for our team-mates and we feared for what might lie in our own futures. Not one of us could have believed that in three months’ time we would be playing in an FA Cup final. It told us, and the rest of the football world, that Manchester United were not a club who would go down easily. At the time the Old Man was asked how long it would take for his team to be a power again. Uncannily now when you look back, he said it would be five years.
My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography Page 15