The added difficulty was that Jack not only took my mother’s side, which was of course his right in the privacy of family life, but he also went public with criticism of my wife. I found this quite unacceptable, and I told him so. I said that often life was a lot more complicated than he made out, and the fact that our mother and Norma did not get on was something that was not uncommon in families. It was a sadness, no doubt, but it was not a matter for handing out easy blame.
There were times, certainly, when Norma could not go along with my mother; it was her right, and however sad I felt about the way things had gone, I always stood by my wife. She was the woman I loved, the mother of my children, and if I had been so lucky in so many things, it was my misfortune that this wonderful woman could not be accepted by my mother. Of course I loved my mother, and of course I respected her, but over the question of Norma I could not say anything other than that she had been unfair. There are occasions in life when it is necessary to be clear in your mind about such a matter.
At the end, when we went to my mother’s funeral with great sadness over the futility of any effort to heal the wounds, I accepted that what had been said and done had to be over. Now, when we meet at England reunions, Norma and Jack’s wife Pat speak and talk about our families, and it is the same with Jack and me. When he is in the Manchester area, he pops into our house and sometimes it is easy, sometimes less so. We are brothers and we have shared so much, and I’m grateful that we are still able to be together, and that it is natural for us to see each other. There were moments, especially after Norma was criticised in public, when I might have exploded, and if that had happened I think everything would have been over for ever. However, life goes on and if I have learned anything it is that it is necessary to accept the need for a little bit of give and take.
Jack has a good heart, I know, and there is no question that along the way he too has been hurt, but my point to him – as it was when I was critical of him publicly when, while we were still players, he announced on television that he had a little black book which listed the names of opponents he intended to get even with on the field – was that occasionally he can be too impetuous, too eager to speak, and to lash out, before thinking through a problem.
I’m pleased to be able to report that Jack is now more receptive to Norma, seems to accept a little more that she has no feelings of regret about her relationship with my mother because she went into it hoping for the best and doing all that she thought she could without losing any pride in herself.
For myself there will always be the sadness that after the great day Jack and I shared at Wembley after winning the World Cup in 1966, when we embraced and agreed that no two football brothers from the North East could have shared such a moment of fulfilment, when maybe our bloodline could not have been more perfectly expressed in the colours of our country, the joy of our experience was somehow clouded by what followed. But then this was only to a certain extent, because, after all, we were our mother’s sons, and there is no question that, whatever came after, she had that supreme moment of pride we shared with her.
Would we have got there without her? Maybe, maybe not, but of course on one huge detail there could be no question. She gave us life and she brought us up the best way she could; she did it with a great passion of her own and in a style that was quite inimitable. She enlisted the help of all her football clan, assuming that they would be as enthusiastic as she was about the prospect that her sons would add to the legends of the family. She fought for us and she made sacrifices for us, and I will never stop loving her for that. The tragedy, for me, was that in the end she could not give me what I wanted most. She couldn’t love my wife. I just wish that she could have understood how much I love Norma, and how important it was for me to have her accepted for what she has always been: the shining light of my life.
14
REBUILDING
THE GENIUS OF Matt Busby reappeared in those years of renewal after Denis Law made his dramatic entrance and Manchester United once again became a team of colour and excitement, but there had been a great weariness on his face when he calculated that it would take five years for the team to be truly recognisable again.
Law was signed for £115,000 in the summer of 1962, before we returned to Wembley to win the FA Cup against Leicester City after the long, bitter winter of 1962–63. I had seen him play many times for Manchester City before his move to Italy, and you could not but be impressed by his speed and his intelligence and that mysterious ability of all great players to suddenly appear in the right place at the right moment.
I was delighted the Old Man had made a signing of such quality – it worked against the idea that the club would never again touch the levels of consistent brilliance and excitement that were achieved in the years before Munich. I told Denis this when he arrived for his first training session. I said, ‘It’s very good to have you around,’ and he gave me that sidelong, slightly quizzical smile that would become so familiar to me down the years. It was as though a lot of the magic and the aura of the old United had been conjured up at a single stroke.
Matt Busby had also picked up Paddy Crerand from Celtic. He passed the ball quite beautifully, and, with Johnny Giles having an impressive game on the right wing, there was real quality in the performance which brought the club the FA Cup, its first trophy since the tragedy. Spring was turning into summer, after an unprecedented fixture pile-up, and there was real warmth and expression in our play. On this day we were no longer grinding out results, patching up our weaknesses. We looked like Manchester United again. We passed, we ran, we scored, easing up with the race well won at 3–1. For United, who had a young Irishman called George Best limbering up in the youth team, the promise was of the best of times.
However, before the arrival of Law and the eventual eruption of Best, sometimes it had to be admitted that even the five-year plan seemed to be an optimistic forecast. The reasons for this could not be avoided; you couldn’t have a great young side torn literally from the sky and expect to proceed with just a few missed heartbeats. This was especially so if the architect of not just a team but an idea, a unique philosophy, carried so much hurt and sadness in his eyes. The fact was that to be close to Matt Busby in that first year or so after the crash was to fear something that was very hard to admit; something that struck at the very heart of the drive for resurrection. It was that even if the Old Man managed to fight back with all the nerve and judgement at his disposal, and know great success again, the chances were he would never be quite the same as he was boarding that plane in Munich. He would never stop drawing the line between good players and great ones; he would never lose his vision of what football should be – and in the end he got to where his deepest ambition lay – but there were times when the struggle was desperate and you knew that he was suffering doubts he had never known before.
It wasn’t just a question of physical pain and the matter of whether he could any longer take the strain of the football life – his wife Jean, and so many admirers, led by Jimmy Murphy, persuaded him that he could do that in the days after we had fought our way to the 1958 FA Cup final. What became apparent was that his body could recover to some large extent, but his old conviction, his amazing ability to transmit confidence and composure, was beyond any complete healing.
During his recuperation in Switzerland in the summer, Jean Busby conquered her husband’s terrible doubts about the wisdom of his carrying on – and his belief that he had let down all those parents who had entrusted their sons to his care and his great European adventure. But down the years, one by one, the secrets of his torment became visible in a sigh, in a distant look in his eyes and – in the last crisis of his career, when so many blamed him for refusing to let new managers like Wilf McGuinness and then Frank O’Farrell have their heads – in a word or two to someone like me that he had reached a point when he no longer had the heart or the energy for the battle.
In the first months after Munich he doubted himself, his call
ing as the messiah of a great football club and, he confessed later, he even doubted the deep faith in God that had carried him through so many difficult days since, as a young boy, he lost his father in the First World War trenches of France.
All this made it remarkable that United should emerge under his guidance for a third time with a third team of great brilliance, but in some ways, I know, he became almost the reluctant leader.
People told him, ‘You’re still the only one who can do the job’ and he accepted the burden. He felt he had to because if Jimmy Murphy was a superb lieutenant, and the most courageous stand-in when his beloved boss lay in a hospital in Germany, he was not, by his own admission, a natural leader of a great football club. That was Matt Busby’s renewed destiny – but as the years wore on you could see clearly the cost to him.
What happened in the long run after Munich was a kind of miracle, no doubt, and the Old Man never ceased to be an inspiration and a force – but sometimes, towards the end of his reign, he confided to me that a combination of weariness and pain had taken an unshakeable hold. He yearned for someone to take up the burden, so that he could withdraw into the margins – but be sure that the club that had become his life would be secure.
It would take a quarter of a century for that man to present himself in the form of Alex Ferguson, but of course in the meantime, the job had to be done and a football empire preserved.
The first part of the campaign was survival, and on the opening day of the 1958–59 season that objective seemed to be attainable to an extent beyond anyone’s dreams, not least my own. I scored three goals in a 5–2 defeat of a Chelsea who could not build on a piece of brilliant individualism by their new young scoring sensation, Jimmy Greaves – and if you listened to the sound of the 52,000 Old Trafford crowd you might have believed that suddenly mere survival was the least of our challenges. There had been serious fears that our Wembley appearance against Bolton a few months earlier had been a step away from reality, and that the patching up done on the team in the days after Munich would break apart soon enough.
But wasn’t there magic in the air again? We prayed so hard that it was so, and three days later, at the City ground, Nottingham Forest were put to the sword as mercilessly as Chelsea. In just over twenty minutes we were three up and untouchable. I scored two more and Albert Scanlon seemed healed and was brilliant again. He had undermined the Chelsea defence with his speed and his crossing and he was no less sharp against Forest, scoring our second goal. Here, surely, was a powerful symbol of the team’s resurrection. Before we flew to Belgrade, Albert had been rampant in that unforgettable game at Highbury, and now he had regained his pace and his confidence – at least it was convenient and uplifting to think so.
There were gaps in our side, both physically and mentally – deep down we knew that, I think – but in football there is always the element of hope and potential and this was, by any standards, a remarkable start to a season which had been greeted with such apprehension. Not only did little Ernie Taylor appear to be comfortably maintaining his ability to create rhythm with his precise and clever passing, but my friend Wilf McGuinness was producing performances of such power and confidence that within weeks he had made a stunning arrival in the England team. No young player had ever faced a more daunting challenge; he had to run in the footsteps of Duncan Edwards in both the shirt of Manchester United and England, but if this created any doubts in his mind, he concealed them magnificently. His running and tackling created great surges of conviction through the team. Looking back, it is so easy, and with hindsight so distressing, to remember how passionately Wilf embraced the vision of United as the team who would not, could not, be snuffed out by the cruelty of Munich.
He was a great friend and a great competitor, and it was one of the quirks of life then that when I was getting married, and nominated him as my best man, the ruling wisdom of the day was that it would be wrong for him, a Catholic boy like so many of my closest friends at United, to take those duties in a Protestant church. Maurice Setters, who was made of similar tough material and came to us from West Bromwich as a man to give us some force and steel, took over Wilf’s duties in the church – and in the team. Maurice was signed soon after Wilf broke his leg in a reserve match, a personal tragedy that was fought against with courage right up to the moment medical advice came crashing in on the spirit of a player cut down so early, so harshly.
Wilf’s disaster came a year after his extraordinary efforts to repair the damage that had been inflicted on the club. For everyone in the dressing room it was another terrible reminder that in football danger can lurk at moments of the greatest certainty. Wilf McGuinness was surely set for a great career, but then so had been Duncan Edwards and John Doherty. Duncan had gone in the great tragedy; John and now Wilf had suffered the kind of random blow that football can deliver at any moment. It gave me another jab of anxiety.
On reflection, it was as though the sad fate of Wilf confirmed one apprehension at Old Trafford – that maybe our present run into second place in the league was more than anything a mirage, an illusion that took us away from certain truths. The fact was that, despite a run of victories, an impressive revival after some drastically sliding form before Christmas, we were never going to catch Wolves, the eventual champions in the 1958–59 season.
Under Cullis, Wolves had kept their strength and their standards and while we fell away from contention the following season, they failed to keep their title, against the challenge of an impressive Burnley team, by just one point. Tottenham were also back in the race now, fortified by David Mackay alongside Danny Blanchflower, and with Cliff Jones producing remarkable form on the left wing, and were about to achieve the Double – the milestone that the Old Man had held so high in his ambitions before Munich. Underlining our discomfort was the fact that the quality of the Tottenham football, particularly, could not fail to remind us of the levels United had achieved before the crash.
It was around this time, I suppose, that I acquired a certain reputation for being a little aloof, and perhaps somewhat reluctant to accept the arrival of players I didn’t know and had not grown up with in the way I had the Busby Babes.
I believe the truth was that I felt I had enough to do just playing my game; I didn’t feel equipped to do anyone else’s job and, for example, I was a little uncomfortable when the Old Man came to me and asked my opinion of Maurice Setters in the wake of Wilf’s injury. What did I think of him? Maurice became a good friend, but I didn’t really know him at that point. All I could say was that he was an extremely strong presence when he played for West Bromwich; you knew you had a serious opponent on the field when he showed up so obviously full of determination and ready to tackle anyone. But would he fit in, was he a United player? I just didn’t know. I was, I reckoned, still too much of a kid to pass such judgements.
As it turned out, Maurice played with great commitment for the club before he finally lost his place to Nobby Stiles after suffering a knee injury; he had a good spirit and good humour, and I always recall with a smile the time we played together at Liverpool in an especially hard-fought game. We were pushing to get back into the match and were about to take a throw-in. Maurice bustled over to the touchline to collect the ball but a young lad kept hold of it. Before joining United, Maurice had had talks with Liverpool, but he was still amazed when the boy, with the ball still tightly gripped in his hands, said, ‘Maurice, why didn’t you come to us? Were the clubhouses not good enough for you?’
This was a period when my perspective was that things had been happening to me very quickly, and then suddenly people were coming to me for views and opinions that I didn’t really feel ready to give. This included other players who had problems, and there were times, if I am honest, when I wondered how long some of the new players would last at the club. It was not a question, at least in my own mind, of my passing negative verdicts on any of those who had come into the void left by Munich, and if my demeanour was a little cool maybe it was because,
despite the goals and the upward profile of my career, I too was in the position of just feeling my way forward.
Certainly I could see the point of Ernie Taylor’s craft and the tackling power of Stan Crowther – and the skills of Albert Quixall, who joined us from Sheffield Wednesday in 1958 for a record fee then of £45,000. Albert played a significant role in my rush of goals – when I broke through an offside trap often it was to get on to the end of one of his perfectly placed passes. However, it was also true that Albert, behind the image of a new blond star of English football, had his own difficulties in settling down in a club which expected so much from everyone, and not least from a record signing.
It would be wrong now to ignore my sense that in the club’s hope and determination to rebuild there was not also a touch of panic. You couldn’t have the old seamless growth in the new situation in which we found ourselves; inevitably there was a need to speculate and take chances.
In the meantime, we had to battle as best as we could towards a point of breakthrough. That came, I believe, with the signing of Denis Law. Before that Matt Busby and Jimmy Murphy had had to probe the market with limited funds, and therefore had to look for the best in home-grown young players like Alex Dawson and Mark Pearson. At the time it didn’t create in me an overwhelming feeling that our future success was in any way guaranteed. The boys were rushed into action and they did well for a time, but there was an immense pressure on them and I imagined there would be a point when the club would ask: how much are they improving, are they going to emerge with the amount of quality we need?
Alex Dawson was not the most rounded footballer, but he had been physically awesome as a youth and was someone who fitted perfectly the stereotype of the big, strong striker. In those days, when so many managers picked a team they wondered, ‘Who is going to knock around defenders and score the goals? Who is going to dominate in the air?’ For a while, before he was transferred to Preston North End, big Alex was able to supply the answer.
My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography Page 17