There were some bleak days indeed and after one game at Burnley, a team of champions brilliantly orchestrated by the great Northern Ireland inside forward Jimmy McIlroy, the ever controversial Bob Lord made a bitter attack on the new United. He said that we had turned into a team of ‘thugs’. The Burnley chairman was no doubt a remarkable character, and unquestionably his club were doing a lot of things right, but his attack after a rough game seemed to many to be below the belt. Maybe it was a settling of some old scores, from old battles when the balance of power was somewhat different, but it did represent a low point in our efforts to rebuild both our team and our image.
My own reaction was to shrug my shoulders because it seemed that a day didn’t pass without some lesson being handed down from the Burnley mountaintop. However, I recall an incident some time later, when I happened to be sitting next to Bob Lord at a testimonial dinner. It was when the issue of players’ wages was boiling to the surface and, during the course of a wider conversation on the subject, I couldn’t believe that such a man was involved in negotiations that would affect the prospects and the livings of so many people: young men who loved to play football but also had families to think about. Eventually, I made my contribution to the debate and said, ‘But surely these are matters which have to be discussed in this day and age? We are talking about the rights of men in a free society, and these are issues which are not going to go away. Directors are just a part of football – they don’t own it.’ He turned to me with what seemed to be heavy contempt and said, ‘Come back and see me in five years’ time, sonny.’
Nearly half a century later, I can only speculate on what he might have had to say on the day that Cristiano Ronaldo signed his new contract with United. Neither of us could have anticipated that a twenty-two-year-old, even one possessing the most startling gifts, would be guaranteed around £6 million a year for five years, but no doubt the effect on Mr Lord would have been rather more dramatic than it was on me. Yes, the scale of the rewards being handed to Cristiano were coming from a new world, a new dimension, but if so much money is pouring into football, if the market can stand it, who better to profit than a young player giving so much excitement and pleasure to the people who sit in the stands, or turn on the televisions, and make football so strong? Back at the turn into the sixties Bob Lord just couldn’t believe that footballers would one day have the right to negotiate out of their own value and their own strength.
The signing of Noel Cantwell from West Ham United in November 1960 was one of the club’s more positive and successful moves. He gave us, maybe especially in the light of the kind of charges made by Bob Lord, something that we sorely needed – authority and a deep sense of self-belief, the kind that Roger Byrne had carried so easily.
Noel was a big, handsome man, a natural sportsman who had for some time been the captain of the Republic of Ireland. He filled a gap that maybe we had not clearly realised had existed as we scrambled to recover from the effects of Munich. He came from the West Ham hothouse of tactics and new training ideas which over the years would produce a stream of managers and coaches like Malcolm Allison, Frank O’Farrell, John Bond and Malcolm Musgrove – and would eventually be commanded by Ron Greenwood, one of the game’s most influential figures after his work in cultivating the great World Cup triumvirate of Bobby Moore, Martin Peters and Geoff Hurst.
Noel was impatient with the training methods that existed generally in the game – and at times he made it clear that he thought a club of United’s status should have made greater strides in this area. Yet, however strong his views and however freely he expressed them, he had a knack of getting his points across without causing any lasting offence. Maybe he wasn’t a diplomat in the way of the Old Man, but he certainly had great style. He talked about the game constantly and with much eloquence, and later it was no surprise when his name was mentioned as a future manager of United. That possibility receded when it became clear that Matt Busby had recast the side soundly and had made it competitive again, along with conquering many of his own post-Munich doubts and demons. Cantwell’s career later became somewhat becalmed at Coventry City, but it said a lot for his impact at such a difficult time of transition that so many saw him as a potential leader of the club.
As someone who always tried to keep his nose out of such issues until they sought me out, my appreciation of Noel Cantwell was much more straightforward. I liked him as a man and, if there was such a thing, I thought he was a United type. I also admired him as a player. He suffered from injuries, and eventually the challenge of Tony Dunne, and sometimes the quality of his playing ability was overlooked, but he was a defender of considerable class, strong on the left side and with a very nice touch. When he led us out for the 1963 cup final, I thought, ‘This is good – we have a real captain.’
At that point, when I was in my mid-twenties, I had no ambitions for the armband. I still felt, and to be honest deep down the thought never left me, I had enough to do supervising my own performances. Still, I felt a sense of great pride when, a year or so after Cantwell’s departure, I was taken aside by the Old Man and told it was time for me to take up the leadership of the team. After Munich the role had gone briefly to Dennis Viollet and Bill Foulkes, and then, when their hard-driving successor Maurice Setters lost his place through injury and the rise of Nobby Stiles, Denis Law had a spell of captaincy. Maybe in the end it was decided I had accumulated the right amount of experience, and perhaps that I had a certain evenness of temperament for the job. I said I was honoured and that I would always try to lead the only way I could, which was by example.
After Cantwell, Matt Busby and Jimmy Murphy were thwarted when they made what they thought would be an equally crucial move for another top-class defender – Blackburn Rovers’ imposing Welsh international centre half Mike England. A £100,000 bid was put in to Blackburn, but it was rejected. For many years Jimmy went on about the scale of the miss, saying, ‘We could have had one of the best centre halves around if we’d forked out another £7,000.’ Even today, I think of Murphy’s fury when I see clubs haggling over the cost of a player a manager has identified as a potentially vital recruit. So much of United’s buying in those transition years was aimed at strengthening weaknesses rather than shaping a team for the future, and that was probably inevitable in our circumstances. Stan Crowther had supplied some muscle and strength in the first months after Munich, but you never really felt he was going to become part of the building. Perhaps understandably, I remember him most for the fact that in all my years in the game he was the one opponent, after he moved to Chelsea, to leave a permanent mark on me – a small scar on my left leg.
Ernie Taylor, like Crowther, had been parachuted into the emergency, and in their different ways they confirmed Jimmy Murphy’s ability to recognise valuable qualities across the whole range of football talent, but they were both gone by the halfway point of the 1958–59 season, Taylor returning to his North East roots when he signed for Sunderland.
Taylor and Crowther missed our charge up the league in the New Year, but it was a feat which was made to look merely cosmetic soon enough as we entered what might be classed as the years of struggle. Ironically, we reached our lowest point, a nineteenth place in the First Division, during the run-up to the 1963 cup final which would prove as much a deliverance as a triumph.
One reason for our losing momentum was that it became clear soon enough, after that rush of goals and second place in the league in the first post-Munich season, that the pace and cleverness along the wings that had been a United staple since the days of Jimmy Delaney and Charlie Mitten had run low with the loss of David Pegg and Johnny Berry.
For a while there had been some reason for a more optimistic view. Warren Bradley had done well for us after being drafted in from the top amateur club Bishop Auckland. He didn’t have the wiles of Berry, but he was quick and brave and he knew how to cross the ball. His initial impact was good enough to win him a few appearances with England, but in the long haul it was
clear the Old Man wanted more. Warren, who would go on to a fine career as a headmaster, was sold to Bury.
Also, Albert Scanlon had at first promised a full recovery in the 1958–59 season, scampering down the left wing and putting in a stream of crosses, many of which I benefited from as I scored twenty-nine goals, missing Jack Rowley’s club record by just one. But behind Albert’s appearance back in the limelight was a sad fact which became more and more apparent down the weeks and the months. He was not the same man. He was not the winger who performed so brilliantly at Highbury a few days before Munich. The reality could be pushed back only for so long. His career was ebbing and he too was sold the following season, to Newcastle United. On Tyneside he made just a few appearances before slipping down into the lower division – another survivor of Munich who found the years hard and painful after the first relief of coming through it with his life, and after a brave fight against his injuries.
Another contender was the Ulsterman Sammy McMillan, a game player but one who, for all his effort, failed to provide the bite and the spark on the flank that Matt Busby and Jimmy Murphy now believed was vital if the team was to get back its old rhythm and balance.
At that time a lack of width, and thus no regular stream of crosses, was still seen as a basic deficiency, even though new trends working against the orthodox brilliance of wingers like Stanley Matthews and Tom Finney were on the horizon. The old convention that a full back alone would tackle a quick and talented winger was running towards the end of its shelf life, and at Manchester City Don Revie had been given the deep-lying role pioneered by the great Hungarian Nandor Hidegkuti. However, even though there were breezes of change in football, if not a full blowing wind, the prevailing fashion was still to have a big centre forward feeding on crosses, and doing it quite ruthlessly with pushes and shoves and plenty of use of his elbows.
At Old Trafford a decision was made. We needed a new winger. It was late in the 1959–60 season, when the problem had become very apparent, that the Old Man spoke to me after a training session. He said, ‘You can use your left foot and your right. We’re struggling a bit on the left side. What about playing left wing?’ It was typical of the Old Man that an order would be couched in terms that suggested you might have a choice. It was bit of a shock because I had grown to love playing in midfield; I liked the freedom of action, the ability to roam wherever I wanted in pursuit of a chance to move on goal. But I did see the problem. We had wingers, but we didn’t have one creating danger – or winning the confidence of his team-mates as they launched themselves into runs on goal. For one reason or another they were not delivering, and the scoring opportunities for Dennis Viollet, Quixall and me – which had been so plentiful the previous season – were dwindling at a critical rate. It was a surprise to be asked at that point in my career to play an entirely different role, but I thought, ‘Well, I’m quick enough, I can cross the ball, why should I be worried? I can play left wing.’
It was frustrating in the first training sessions that followed the move. When the cries kept swirling in from Jimmy Murphy, ‘Stay on your line,’ my first reaction was, ‘Oh, maybe I’m not sure about this.’ But even though I missed my freedom so acutely, I did tell myself, ‘Well, I’ll adapt, the important thing is that I’m playing, I’m not harmed by injury.’ Though it was jarring to be placed in what felt a bit like a straitjacket, I did meet some early success. In my first game on the wing I supplied the cross for the opening goal from Alex Dawson in a 3–1 defeat of Nottingham Forest, then scored the other two. On the right side Johnny Giles, who like me thought of himself as a midfielder, also had a lively game.
When I really thought about it, it was not so hard to see the point of the decision. I was sharp over twenty yards and I could use my left foot. I scored three more in the next three games and for a little while I was quite mollified. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘it’s not as though I’m out of balance and I can’t use my left foot. I’m playing well, and anyway, I probably won’t be out here for too long.’
It was three years before I returned to what I would always regard as my natural hunting ground, the wide stretches across the middle of the field. Some of the time was made quite hellish by Jimmy Murphy’s voice in my ear. I was so close to him out there on the wing and he was relentless. ‘Stay there, don’t move!’ he would yell, and my frustration often came close to breaking point. Once, at Nottingham Forest, I swore I didn’t touch the ball for twenty-five minutes. It provoked the saying at Old Trafford that you could die of cold out on the left wing waiting for a pass.
However, I never reached the point of complaining officially, despite the prompting from Jackie Milburn, who thought I had graduated to the point where I could make my own demands. Trouble was, I couldn’t have made the argument to Jimmy or the Old Man that I wasn’t playing well. They could have said, ‘Look, you’re helping the team, you’re scoring goals and you’re playing so well you have even been recalled by England.’
In fact I was enjoying the benefit of both my own natural speed and that early education by Jimmy, who spent so many hours teaching me how to ‘throw a shoulder’ and strike when my marker was on the back foot. ‘Just do it straight away,’ he urged me. ‘Throw that shoulder as if you’re going inside and you’ll catch them on their heels and be gone.’
On my way back into the England team I played for the Football League against the Scottish League. They had a little right back called Bobby Shearer, a typical little red-haired Scottish full back of the type that was beginning to go out of fashion. He was a good, hard-tackling pro, but after the game I said to myself that I hoped I would be playing against him when Scotland came to Wembley in a few weeks’ time. He played, we won 9–3 and I lost count of the times I was able to follow the Murphy formula and knock the ball past him. I didn’t score, but did have a very effective game.
Overall, the conclusion had to be that despite the irritation – and sometimes I made it clear to the bench and my team-mates it was more than that – of not seeing enough of the ball, I was still able to make an impact at regular intervals, and a good contribution to the team. However, there were difficult days. For instance, playing against my future World Cup team-mate George Cohen was never an easy challenge. He was at the forefront of the new full backs, quick and hard and unwilling to give a winger an easy yard. Once, during an England game in Peru, I was made angry in a way that summed up so much of the frustration that I carried in my years on the wing. The Peruvian right back just grabbed me whenever I went by him. Each time the referee waved play on. Later, at a reception, I said to the official, who spoke very good English, ‘I don’t want this to sound like sour grapes, but isn’t there a rule somewhere that when a full back is beaten he is not entitled to wrap his arms around the player who has gone by him.’ Straight faced, the referee said, ‘Yes, you’re quite right, but we don’t follow that rule here.’
In a new era of defensive play, with the development of quick and often highly ruthless defenders, it seemed inevitable that my professional life could only get harder. Then a miracle came along and the Old Man and Jimmy Murphy decided that I had served my time on the wing and I could return to the wide and welcoming terrain of midfield. The miracle had a name. It was called George Best.
15
TEAM OF STARS
ON THE FIELD, if not always off it, I understood immediately the meaning of the arrival of first Denis Law, then George Best. In the past I had wondered whether my ideal of the Manchester United player had been lost forever. Now that doubt vanished.
Though we were never close in a day-by-day, personal way, and our lives rarely intertwined beyond the affairs of the football club, we knew how each of us contributed to the rise of the team, and I know, when everything else was set aside, we gloried in our ability to make exciting and, quite often, beautiful football. That was our pride. Our good luck was to be thrown together, and this was the mark of Matt Busby’s genius in grasping the chemistry of the game: how different characters and types o
f talent could meld so well that, at the very best of times, they became one. Denis would always be a loner to quite a sharp degree, the maverick Scot making his own sense of all that he found before him, and George, of course, went his own way so often when the training was done – with or without his involvement – in the later stages of his time at Old Trafford. It is the way things are, I imagine, in any dressing room or company of men when great deeds are achieved: individual strengths and weaknesses are absorbed, and compensated for, in the growth of a winning team.
I will always be proud to have been part of the Big Three, to have my name linked forever with George and Denis, and that was the overwhelming feeling I know Denis and I shared when we all came together one last time in the hospital room in London shortly before George died at the end of 2005.
But before the Big Three attracted so much of the attention and the glory in the third coming of Busby’s United, there was the Big Four – the rather ironic title Shay Brennan, David Herd, Nobby Stiles and I applied to our dressing-room alliance in those formative years of a new and all-conquering team. At the start there were just the three of us: Shay, always amiable and mischievous and carefree; David, the new signing from Arsenal; and me. We drifted together quite naturally, played cards, went to the pictures and for a while I used to go to the dogs at Belle Vue with Shay.
I was never really interested in the dog racing itself, but I enjoyed Shay’s company, you could have a good meal at the track, and I found it remarkable that it didn’t seem to matter to him whether he won or lost. He was drawn to the excitement and the uncertainty, and when he lost he simply shrugged his shoulders. I remember being in the dressing room one morning when someone said that Shay had taken a big loss at the dogs – it was when my attendance had fallen, partly because of failing interest and, probably more importantly, because it cut across the demands of my new married life. The word was that Shay had lost £200 – or roughly a month’s wages. I was both concerned and fascinated to see how he would be. In fact he was exactly the same as always. He made a few jokes as he changed for training. He was happy-go-lucky, at least on the surface, in a way that I could never be. In earlier times I would arrange to meet him in town after a match on Saturday. The meeting place was the public library in the centre of town, near to a little cinema we used to go to after a beer or two. Sometimes, though, he would be an hour late and I would be fuming. ‘Where the hell do you think you’ve been?’ I would ask him. ‘I’ve been standing here for an hour, wasting my life away.’ He would just make a joke of it and say, ‘Bobby, why get yourself worked up?’ Sometimes, usually after he had made me laugh, I would say, ‘Well, I wish I could be like you.’
My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography Page 18