We were progressing at pace, with a growing swell of opportunities coming our way, although we failed to take advantage of them all. West Ham United, then Leeds, running and tackling endlessly in their promotion year, beat us in the FA Cup semi-finals of 1964 and 1965, and there was crushing disappointment when we failed, in ’64, to exploit the 1963 cup final win over Leicester which returned us, a little too nonchalantly in the end, to Europe in the Cup-Winners’ Cup.
At first things went well. We drew and then won in the legs against Willem II. Then Tottenham, defending their crown, were swept aside 4–1 at Old Trafford after beating us 2–0 in the first leg of the quarter-final at White Hart Lane. Spurs suffered a terrible blow when Dave Mackay broke his leg after colliding with Noel Cantwell, but then we lost Maurice Setters for some time with a head wound. Danny Blanchflower had gone, but Spurs were still full of quality with men like John White, Cliff Jones and Jimmy Greaves. David Herd scored the goals that drew us level on aggregate and though Greaves pushed Tottenham into the lead again, I was able to respond with two goals in the last ten minutes. I had the feeling that we would soon have our hands on a piece of European silverware – not the one we craved, the European Cup itself, but something to announce that we were winning again on the foreign ground we once pioneered.
However, in Lisbon, just a few miles down the road from the Estadio da Luz where George would change the scale of his career and his life in another two years, Sporting Lisbon ambushed us at the Alvalade Stadium. George scarcely got a kick. Nor did the rest of us. Sporting, trailing 4–1 from the first leg, beat us 5–0. No one could look back on this night with any satisfaction, and least of all poor Maurice Setters. After the game he stumbled on the marble floor of our hotel lobby in Estoril and injured his knee.
This left the door open for Nobby Stiles, who for so long had been in search of a settled first-team place. The Old Man received a word in his ear from Jimmy Murphy: Norrie, as the Old Man always called Nobby, was perfectly equipped to replace Maurice alongside Bill Foulkes, and make the position his own. It meant that Nobby’s professional life had – for him just as profoundly as George’s would also do – changed in Lisbon. He was not destined to be a star of the discos or the boutiques, but he would make his name as an English folk hero. As so often in football, a mishap for one player makes the future of a team-mate. The door opened for Stiles – and he went through and closed it behind him more smoothly, more emphatically, than he would ever do anything else in his life.
I have already expressed my love for Nobby, my admiration for him as a man and a competitor, but maybe it is time to give some of the flavour of what he brought to us on a permanent basis, something beyond his almost psychic reading of an opposing team. He made me laugh so hard that the tears ran down my face, and the sportswriter Hugh McIlvanney once wrote that compared to Nobby, Inspector Clouseau was ‘blessedly adroit’. No one could accuse him of over-statement.
Nobby didn’t say good morning. Instead, he always reported a catastrophe. A typical offering was: ‘You’ll never guess what I did this morning, Bob …’ I would agree, and then he would say something like, ‘I pulled the garage door off.’ We heard that one on more than one occasion.
He excelled himself when we arrived in Australia after a long flight which had made several stops. For the trip I had borrowed an expensive camera, which I had put in one bag, and in another I’d placed some duty-free items, including a bottle of brandy I had bought on the way out from England. At Sydney airport, I asked Nobby to look after the bags while I went off to the duty free shop. When I got back there was only one bag, and it didn’t look right. It wasn’t. The brandy bottle was broken and the camera was floating. Nobby was quite agitated. He said, ‘It’s your bloody fault. You shouldn’t have left them with me.’ I said, ‘Fair enough Nobby, but just out of interest, could you tell me, please, what happened?’
Nobby said he had thought it stupid that I had a small amount of stuff in two bags. Why not put all the items into one bag? Of course it made perfect sense – right up to the point that Nobby smashed the bag against a chair.
Another time, he described one memorable scene in Market Street, a main thoroughfare of Manchester, as if he was a pure victim. ‘Some silly bugger banged into the back of my car,’ he reported. Of course he leaped out, but the other driver pointed at Nobby’s bumper and said, ‘Look, I don’t think I’ve done too much damage.’ They both bent down at the same time to inspect the bumper – and they nutted each other. Apparently a large crowd gathered.
When he moved to Middlesbrough, I was able to follow the trail of disaster whenever he appeared on television. A plaster on his neck told me he had cut himself while shaving. If he had one on his forehead it meant he had had a problem getting in or out of his car. A plaster on the nose suggested he had walked into a door or maybe a set of French windows. Stories would be swapped around the dressing room on an almost daily basis.
Because I shared a room with Nobby from time to time, with both United and England, the law of averages said that I would have the best story, and the truth is that the airport performance was really a relatively minor example of his destructive potential. Far more extraordinary was his performance one morning when we were returning from England duty in London. We were sharing a room in a hotel near Euston station and had slept quite late. When I awoke I realised we had scarcely an hour to get on the train. I didn’t need to shave so I was quickly into my clothes. To help with the job of rousing Nobby, I switched on a little radio attached to the bedroom wall.
As he got out of bed he said we needed some light and walked over to the window to draw the curtains. When he tugged them they fell to the floor. He then complained about the noise of the radio and reached to switch it off. On cue, it fell off the wall. Then he went to the washbasin. He collided with the glass shelf where you put your shaving gear and soap. Everything fell down. All this action was compressed into no more than five minutes. It remains a mystery how Nobby was able to make the short journey to the station without the help of an ambulance crew.
On that flight down to Australia he reported that he had quite a number of relatives there. However, he was going to avoid them. His theory was that they must have been in a huff when they decided to emigrate. Yet one morning in Brisbane I walked into the hotel lobby only to see Nobby in the middle of a great crowd of people. They all wanted to know how it was back in Manchester – and particularly in their part of it, Collyhurst. They were all relatives.
Uncannily, when Nobby went out to the field he became one of the most business-like footballers I would ever see. His timing and sense of space and movement were simply phenomenal, something which you couldn’t help but reflect upon when sometimes, after a game, you had to get down on your hands and knees to help him find a lost contact lens. Once, he had to implore the head groundsman to keep on the floodlights. He desperately needed to see a glint in the grass.
With Nobby such a force, both as a lynchpin in defence and a character in the dressing room, and with the sense of a team growing so steadily, the title wins of 1965 and 1967 were surely the signal that the European drought would end soon enough. It was an intoxicating thought, but there was more frustration of the kind that had come to us in the game against Sporting Lisbon in 1964.
The following season we were knocked out of the Inter Cities Fairs Cup by Hungarian club Ferencváros in a semi-final play-off, but that disappointment was nothing compared to the blow that hit us at Old Trafford a year later – we had been convinced that 1966 was the year we were supposed to win the big one. We had thought that it had been written in the sky above the Estadio da Luz when we thrashed Benfica in the quarter-final, when the Portuguese team, who had never been beaten at home in the European Cup they had won twice, presented the European Player of the Year trophy to the great Eusebio.
Benfica had bristled with confidence despite their 3–2 loss in the first leg. Estadio da Luz, after all, was a fortress: in nineteen previous European Cup ties at the ground th
ey had won eighteen and drawn one, scoring seventy-eight goals in the process. They had appeared in four of the five previous European Cup finals. A tremendous roar greeted the first whistle. From that moment it was George Best’s game, football history will always be sure about that, but in fact the whole team functioned beautifully.
More than forty years later, soon after George’s death, Denis Law and I spent a nostalgic morning together at The Cliff training ground. We communed with the ghosts of the past and, as you sometimes do on such occasions, we considered when our old team hit its highest level of performance. When did everything fit together most perfectly? When did we understand most completely what each of us was about? We agreed very quickly it was that night in Lisbon when we tore Benfica apart. Georgie ran riot, but then so did the team. Every pass seemed to find its target. Every run seemed to have a point. We were unstoppable – and surely we would remain so in the semi-finals against Partizan Belgrade?
Of course it would have been impossible to come up with a match that carried any heavier load of emotion. For Matt Busby, Harry Gregg, Bill Foulkes and me going back to Belgrade was like retracing footsteps that never ceased to haunt us. In footballing terms Partizan were not so special, certainly not as good as the team we had come so close to dismantling on that frozen pitch in the first half of our last game before Munich, but we were caught in a strange, almost eerie listlessness. There was also the problem of George Best. The destroyer of Benfica had picked up a cartilage injury in an FA Cup match against Preston, but the Old Man, conscious of the mystique that George had created in Lisbon, asked him to go into the game with his knee strapped. However, when Best missed an early chance that in Lisbon he would probably have converted with his eyes closed, it was clear that the gamble would fail.
Partizan scored early in the second half, taking a quick throw-in which we claimed was ours, and we were never able to get back in the game. Denis Law drew a fine save from the goalkeeper, and then hit the bar, but that was the extent of our chances. We lost 2–0, and if it was the kind of deficit that had been swept aside in the past, with the Stretford End willing their visitors to defeat, there was perhaps now a sense that a team from Belgrade, for one reason or another, might never be party to our happiness. This feeling was evident not least in the eyes of Matt Busby. He made the usual pronouncements, in the bowels of the stadium after the game and at Old Trafford a week later, but maybe the word Belgrade and the thought of once again confronting a Serbian team had provoked an old dread.
At first the theory looked vulnerable enough as we swarmed all over them in the second leg, but Partizan defended as though they were manning tank traps. Paddy Crerand and a Belgrade player were sent off for fighting, which was to our disadvantage in that we missed the bite of his long passing. Nobby Stiles scored in the seventy-third minute, but it was no good: the curse of Belgrade could not be lifted.
A few days later we lost yet another semi-final, to Everton at Bolton in the FA Cup.
For the Old Man it was revisiting old disappointment, old pain. He knew the team was strong and talented, and more competitive than it had been at any time since Munich, but after Lisbon he had been convinced that it was finally his time to win the prize in which he had invested so much more than mere football ambition. Defeat by Everton was a blow, but it was the one by Partizan which hurt down to his bones. In the dressing room he sighed, and submitted to a wave of doubt and depression. ‘We will never win the European Cup now,’ he said.
Very soon, Nobby and I would be celebrating our part in winning the World Cup for England – but it did not disguise the fact that we were left with some unfinished business. There was one last burden placed on our ambitions. It was, of course, to prove the Old Man wrong.
18
FORGING TEAM SPIRIT
OLD TRAFFORD, 18 March 1967: it should have been a day to cherish, one of those you remember warmly when you look back on a campaign that ended in success. We beat Leicester City 5–2, George Best made some wonderful runs, I scored with a low shot, Denis Law chipped over my World Cup team-mate Gordon Banks quite beautifully, and the new blood of substitute David Sadler flowed strongly as he headed in the fifth.
Yet not even the news that Burnley, leaping out of the pack as their days of power began to ebb, had ambushed Liverpool and helped strengthen our place at the top of the league could drive the chill out of the dressing room.
The wider picture might come into focus somewhere along the line of the twenty undefeated games which would carry us to another title – and open up Europe once again – but for the moment all any of us could see was David Herd lying on the pitch seriously injured.
David, as he so often did, had given us the perfect start against Leicester in a match vital to our long-term prospects. He scored inside two minutes. It was a routine reward for his hard running and powerful shot. Then he broke his leg. You could see it was a bad break by the way he went down and then the look on his face.
I had seen it happen to John Doherty, Wilf McGuinness, and now David Herd. Inevitably, there are two reactions. You are first reminded of your own good luck, then of how brittle the football life, like the human body, can be. It means that you are obliged to take every day, every game, as it comes, and be grateful that it has passed, if not successfully, at least safely.
Such thoughts dominated the dressing room as we showered and reflected on how easily it could have been any one of us in David’s place at the hospital as a doctor examined the damage and offered the most hopeful words he could muster for a man who, so soon after the exhilaration of scoring in front of a vast crowd, was suddenly looking into a future which offered not a single guarantee.
Like so many of the other victims down the years, David said he would fight his fate. He did that, as you would have expected of such a committed professional, but his courage could only take him so far.
He never made it back into the team. He missed the most glorious passage of a side he had done so much to make strong and confident, and what might have been a superb climax to a fine career became a losing fight against the heaviest odds. He went, briefly, to Stoke City, and then played for Waterford in the League of Ireland. Finally, and just for a year, he managed Lincoln City.
David Sadler, who had substituted for David Herd after he was carried off, again took Herd’s place in the next match, the one at Anfield that everyone said could well decide the championship. Liverpool had their strongest side: Lawrence, Lawler, Hughes, Smith, Yeats, Stevenson, Callaghan, Hunt, St John, Strong and Thompson. This – with the possible exception of the Leeds United of John Giles, Billy Bremner and Norman Hunter – was the most relentless team in England, and you could see on their faces that Bill Shankly had not been in one of his more whimsical moods when he gave the pre-match talk. You could also see this in the way the Liverpool manager bustled his way down the corridor which, before it reaches the pitch, displays the intimidating notice, ‘This is Anfield.’ As if you didn’t know. Apparently there were no jokes, this time, about the need to overcome just three men. Still furious about the loss to Burnley, Shankly said his men were in danger of throwing away the title they had won so convincingly the previous season – with a six-point margin over Leeds – if they did not ‘fight like men’.
Liverpool’s response was to produce one of their trademark performances, full of running and pressure. Ian Callaghan provoked a brilliant save from Alex Stepney. Then Ian St John flattened Stepney in a collision on the line. Tommy Smith was coming into his prime, tackling and moving forward quite ferociously in following Shankly’s version of the instructions Jimmy Murphy always used to hammer into my ears. For Tommy, the advice was always the same: make your presence felt, show them you’re on the field. Translation: establish physical and psychological dominance from the word go.
The Old Man had told us that he saw this as a classic test of our determination to inject into our game a little of the steel that he believed had become such a vital factor in the game, both in England
and in Europe – something we may have lacked to a crucial degree when sliding out of the European Cup in Belgrade the previous year. He was not disappointed. Stepney was defiant on his line and the back four of Tony Dunne, Bill Foulkes, Nobby Stiles and Bobby Noble seemed capable of mopping up the pressure until midnight.
Everyone agreed that the goalless draw was our moral victory. We had proved that we could slug it out in the trenches as well as score pretty goals, and there was a lot of satisfaction on the team bus rolling home down the East Lancashire Road. It is the way of football to celebrate great victories, to make them the milestones of any career, but sometimes a deeper pride comes from knowing that you have come up with a result under the heaviest pressure. It strengthens you in a way that is never true of a flurry of goals against opposition which, deep down, you know has been wanting in some vital area of the game.
Though I had been as unable to provide a cutting edge of counter-attack as either Denis Law or George Best, I still felt this had been a good and significant day. We had achieved our basic ambition of frustrating a Liverpool we knew would attack us from the first whistle, and both Matt Busby and Jimmy Murphy seemed pleased with the level of effort. Jimmy had passed on his usual insight that footballers never suffered heart attacks because of hard work and he was quick to say that we had shown enough energy – and spirit. There had been some evidence of the mettle of champions.
It was a theory confirmed in the penultimate match of the season at Upton Park, where we completed our twentieth unbeaten league game with a 6–1 trouncing of West Ham. My World Cup team-mates Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters suffered as painfully as Gordon Banks had at Old Trafford, but once again one of our most extravagant attacking performances was achieved under a shadow; in fact at the end of this occasion, after goals from George Best, Denis Law (2), Paddy Crerand, Bill Foulkes and me, there were two reasons for gloom working against the elation we felt at landing another title.
My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography Page 22