At the end of the match there was fighting on the terraces, some of the worst, it was said, ever seen in an English football ground, and though the disease of football hooliganism was still in its teething stages, there had been earlier evidence that the days when a man could take his family to a game without danger might be on the point of disappearing. It was depressing to think that the times Jack and I had enjoyed so much at St James’ Park and Roker Park might soon belong to another, all but forgotten culture. Hooliganism is a threat which has come and gone and then returned down the years since then, but if there is one common duty for all in football it is to be vigilant in a way that perhaps none of us were when the problem first began to take deep root in the sixties.
The other reason for sadness was the absence of Bobby Noble, who at twenty-one had been playing so well that he had kept my friend Shay Brennan out of the side. Bobby, a Stockport lad, was not the most elegant full back you ever saw, and there were also stories that off the field and away from the club he liked a good time, but he had all the qualities of a great defender. He was especially suited to meet the new demand of Matt Busby for a United who defended and tackled as hard as it attacked elegantly. Two weeks before the decisive performance at West Ham, Bobby had been involved in a car crash while driving home after a game with Sunderland. Like David Herd, he insisted he would win back his place, but when he came back to work he made a shocking discovery. His head and chest injuries had taken away his natural understanding of how to play the game.
There had been other prices to pay for the championship win which Matt Busby had made such a priority. However, when you considered how cruelly David Herd and Bobby Noble had been cut down, a 5–1 League Cup defeat by Blackpool, and Norwich City’s 2–1 fourth round FA Cup win before a huge crowd at Old Trafford, didn’t seem quite so disastrous. As it turned out, in fact, these slip-ups almost seemed pre-ordained, as though for us there could be only one major challenge – the title and beyond.
For Matt Busby, as his eyes turned to Europe again, there was one great encouragement. He had reason to believe once more that his team, despite the setbacks, had shown a capacity to grow stronger after the kind of disappointment which had threatened to be so crushing in Belgrade. The suspicion then was that something as vital as reasonable hope had died in the Old Man that gut-wrenching night in Serbia, but such fears had surely been banished in the campaign which followed, before the final break-out at Upton Park – the classic pattern of winning at home and drawing away.
This is something that doesn’t just sprout overnight. It is a collective understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of team-mates, a willingness to fight, to grow strong at the points of vulnerability. There had been plenty of those down the years, not least in the run of semi-final defeats, but there was also a sense that we could come back with our self-belief undamaged.
It was certainly a satisfying time for me to reflect on the course of my career. I would be thirty in a few months and though my enthusiasm for the game was as strong as ever – as were my ambitions – I already had plenty of reasons to be grateful for all the circumstances that had drawn me to United and their special vision on how the game should be played.
I had been part of three championship-winning teams, won one and lost two FA Cup finals, plus played in more semi-finals than I cared to recall, and had reached two European Cup semi-finals. I had also just been voted European Player of the Year, a great honour but one which I also accepted on behalf of the England team who had won the World Cup and a Manchester United team which had once again proved that it was still a major force in the game.
It meant that with the Old Man and Bill Foulkes, the only other survivor of Munich still playing in the team, I was left with just one unfulfilled goal. We had to make another run at the European Cup, we had to put right the losses against AC Milan, Real Madrid and Partizan at the last but one hurdle – and we had to make good on that promise we had all made to ourselves at various stages of our recovery from the air crash.
Ten years on, which if we could do it was not so long down the road of a football club, we had to make a proper monument for the men who died in Munich.
In the summer of 1967, we had reason to believe that the coming season might just see the completion of five years of growth which, taken overall, was not so difficult to measure. At Wembley in 1963 some of the chemistry had been in place; now, two titles and a near miss in Europe later, we could look back on some great days – and great matches – with considerable pride. There was a bit more fibre – and maybe devil – about Manchester United. We could see where the doubts had been engaged and countered and where, after some failure, we had made our strongest efforts to reassert our status as a leading team.
Many would have chosen the eruption at the Estadio da Luz as the most compelling evidence that we were indeed able to compete again at the highest level, but in the matter of forging the team’s spirit my favourite example was not one match but three. All of them were against Sunderland, who, though it was hard to believe for much of the time, were still a Second Division team in 1964. That status, though, was obviously a temporary condition when we drew them in the quarter-final of the 1963–64 FA Cup. Under their tough and experienced manager Alan Brown – who had earlier built a reputation for iron discipline in shaping Burnley into a major force in the land – Sunderland had invested heavily in young players and were moving back to what they believed was a right dictated by their history: a return to the First Division which had been their constant home from the nineteenth century until they were relegated in 1958.
Sunderland won the league title six times before they were relegated. Now, everything about them, and not least the fervour of their vast support, said they were impatient to be back where they belonged. All three games, I believe, pushed forward the understanding of football in all those who saw them – and in all those who played.
Brown was fighting out the Second Division champion ship with Leeds United’s Don Revie, and there wasn’t a hint of an inferiority complex about Sunderland when they came at us so strongly at Old Trafford. Their confidence was well founded. They moved the ball with conviction, and when they ran into forward positions they did it with a bright optimism. They had strength in all areas of the team. Jimmy Montgomery, as he would prove so spectacularly nearly a decade later, when he defied a then mighty Leeds United in the 1973 cup final, was a goalkeeper of both nerve and great agility. In the middle of their defence, they had a glamorous giant, the handsome, elegant Irishman Charlie Hurley, who even in the Second Division was said to be one of the country’s best-paid players. He had both talent and aura, and in Sunderland was nothing less than a cult figure. Nick Sharkey, a product of a good youth system, was building a reputation as a striker; another Irishman, Johnny Crossan, was recognised as one of the most skilful players in the game, and out on the left George Mulhall was a winger of craft who had been capped by Scotland.
This was a team who were right to believe they could offer more than hope and speculation, and just before, and after, half time they proved it with devastating effect. First Mulhall headed in a cross from his fellow winger Brian Usher, then Crossan ran from the halfway line to beat our goalkeeper Dave Gaskell. Maybe it was because of my tribal origins in the North East, but I had rarely felt so drawn into a battle, and there was some relief when Hurley, of all people, headed into his own goal.
In the first half, despite the quality of the opposition, we had probably assumed that our firepower, which had carried us through a crisis at Southampton in the third round, then swept us by Bristol Rovers and Barnsley, would again be the decisive factor. The result was a performance which was not as disciplined as it should have been in defence and we paid again, just five minutes after Hurley’s own goal, when Shay Brennan fouled Crossan and then had to watch him score the penalty. With four minutes to go, we were still 3–1 down and you could sense the resignation seeping from the Old Trafford terraces. But this, we seemed to be saying, j
ust wouldn’t do. We raised ourselves for one last push and in the 87th minute I did something rather extraordinary. I went in for a corner and headed it home. We won the ball at the restart and swept down on Montgomery again, this time with George Best finishing the move for 3–3.
Four days later the battle was resumed at Roker Park in circumstances that would prove quite unforgettable. If anyone had ever doubted the passions that football could release in my corner of the country, they needed to be in the little streets around the old stadium. The official gate figure was 46,727, but gates were knocked down and some estimates had the crowd as high as 90,000 – with another thousand, finally, locked out.
Sunderland didn’t have a ticket system and it was a case of first come, first served. As we travelled from our hotel to the stadium, it seemed as though the whole world wanted to see the game. Apart from local pride, it also said something about the rise of Manchester United back to some of the old levels of appeal first created by the lovely football produced by the team of 1948. It took the team bus an hour to inch round from one side of the ground to the other.
Again the pressure was immense out on the field – and again we struggled to stay in the tie. Nick Sharkey scored five minutes before half time and it took us half an hour to equalise, Denis Law winning a vital half yard against a defence which until then hadn’t offered an inch. The noise generated by all those fans crammed into the dark, and what must have been extremely dangerous, terraces was amazing. It was though we were playing beyond ourselves, carried on by the fervour of the crowd and an unwillingness, after so much effort, to abandon the fight.
Extra time was inevitable – and yet another ordeal for us. In the first minute, Maurice Setters lost control of the ball in the rain and it squirted past Dave Gaskell. With two minutes to go, we were heading out of the cup we had won so convincingly less than a year before. Then, as Sunderland was building to a roar that would surely have swept down across the River Wear and along the coastline, I repeated my unlikely deed of the first game. I headed another equaliser. The ball came to me in the air in the box, but I cannot say it was a particularly assured nod of my head. The ball went in a slow arc over the line, with just the tips of Jimmy Montgomery’s fingers away from stopping it.
In the second replay at Huddersfield, before 54,952 ticket-holding fans, Nick Sharkey again put Sunderland in the lead, two minutes after half time. However, this time there was a factor beyond the discipline and the work ethic the old general Alan Brown had injected into his team. Denis Law, returning to the ground where he had first beguiled Bill Shankly, announced he was in a familiar place and was taking charge. No one could do that more imperiously, and his first goal came a minute after Sharkey’s. His hat-trick was completed in the 61st minute. Phil Chisnall interjected with one goal and David Herd made it 5–1.
Sunderland deserved better than that score-line after putting so much effort – and skill – into the three games, but they would have some reward when, after so spectacularly signalling their intentions to return to the top flight, they fought on and shared promotion to the First Division with Leeds a few weeks later.
For us what came after was only anti-climax: a 3–1 defeat by West Ham down the road in Hillsborough, and second place to Liverpool in the league. But then maybe sometimes there are other measurements to be made: when the team bus pulled away from the Leeds Road stadium, the arena Denis Law had reclaimed so brilliantly and where, after the fight of our lives, we had finally come out on top, I said to myself, ‘Well, if you ever wanted to watch football, or play football, it could never get better than this. I will never forget these three games.’ That still holds as true today as when the final whistle came on that muddy field in Yorkshire.
I remember the matches quite separately and for different reasons. The first one carried the shock of struggling to compete with a second divison team, even though it was one of obvious talent and managed by one of the early pioneers of modern, organised football. Brown was a difficult, often inaccessible man, but he imposed standards and won many admirers, not least another coaching revolutionary, Malcolm Allison, who produced a wonderfully dynamic Manchester City team.
The second game at Roker distilled everything I believed was true about the potential of football to capture the imagination of the ordinary working man. There was a fever in the moist air.
The third game was made to look one-sided, but at least half of it wasn’t. It required us to drive ourselves forward as we had never done before – and would rarely be asked to again.
Looking back, the semi-final defeat which then came to us against West Ham – a team we had beaten 2–0 on their own ground a week earlier – was not such a disgrace. Bobby Moore had one of his best ever club games, and when we called on the last of our reserves – one step from a return to Wembley – we found they had gone. They had been drawn out of us by Sunderland three times in nine days, and when we travelled to Hillsborough it was to try to cross a bridge too far. However, I would never believe all that effort had been misspent.
19
THE FOOTBALL TRIP OF OUR LIVES
ONE DAY RECENTLY I was sitting alone in the Old Trafford stands, facing the Stretford End and taking in the sweep of the empty, beautifully manicured green field as I thought of the old days and old games. Suddenly a burst of action flared in my mind’s eye: light summer rain was falling as Denis Law won the ball at the goal-line to the left of the near posts and made off irresistibly down the left side. When the full back, Tottenham’s Joe Kinnear, came to challenge, Denis went by him as though he didn’t exist.
It had been wonderful and unforgettable to see. I had been out on the left, but moved inside to create the space that would accommodate Denis’s run. Brian Kidd, who at eighteen was making a statement of talent that might rush him to glory at an age when I had still been fretting over my chances of getting to play just one game at the highest level, had already announced an easy ability to slip his marker, and he did this again, perfectly, before inviting a pass. Denis laid the ball into Kidd, who quickly rolled it across the front of the eighteen-yard line and into my path. The shot swirled past Pat Jennings, one of the greatest goalkeepers of all time.
The movement had lasted no more than five or six seconds. I had made my run without ever being near the ball. The Spurs defence, which was also manned by players of the quality of Dave Mackay, Mike England and Cyril Knowles, had not come near to closing the hole made for me by Denis Law’s charge and the movement of young Kidd.
It was a lovely moment – and an encouraging signal in a Charity Shield game that introduced the season of 1967–68 which, whatever else it produced, required us to win the European Cup.
In one way, though, the passage of play which was so thrilling to be part of, and which I have always been able to recall so vividly that it might have happened yesterday, was something of an illusion in what it said about the future of Denis Law. For three seasons largely free of injuries he had been unstoppable, and now it seemed, when maybe it would matter more than ever before, he was still in the richest vein of his career. Unfortunately, however, the sweet and biting simplicity of Denis’s impact on that game against Spurs became progressively elusive through the season, initially through disciplinary problems – he missed nine matches after a fight with Arsenal’s Ian Ure, a climax to some volatile reactions to heavy tackling which had plunged him into controversy when an opponent’s jaw was broken in a flare-up on the summer tour of Australia – and then, more seriously, through injury.
He would play just three games in our European Cup campaign, and two of them were in the formal business of the tie with the part-timers of Hibernians of Malta. By the end of the season, Denis would be in a hospital bed after a knee operation.
There would be other disappointments. We were ejected from the FA Cup in the third round, losing by the only goal, which came fourteen minutes into extra time of a replay against Spurs at White Hart Lane. Also, in a tremendous race, we let go of our title on the las
t day, losing 2–1 to fifteenth-placed Sunderland while Manchester City, having won at Tottenham a few days earlier, claimed the championship in a thrilling 4–3 win at Newcastle. It didn’t help that City’s Malcolm Allison’s after-match reaction was less than modest. He said, ‘Next stop Mars?’
We, however, still had to face our most pressing reality. Our next stop was in Madrid, at the Bernabeu, for the second leg of the European Cup semi-final. It was not inter-planetary travel, just the most important football trip of our lives.
Little or nothing in the campaign had proved easy – even the Maltese had held us to a goalless draw on their flinty pitch – but the harder it got, the more determined we became. Losing the cup was unfortunate, mislaying the title careless, but no one wanted to consider the possibility of surrender in Europe.
In the second round in Bosnia, Sarajevo tested our resolve in the only way they could. They were a team of limited ability, but, like most Balkan sides, they lacked nothing in resolve – or physical ruthlessness. The tackles were flying in, sometimes thigh high, and Alex Stepney did well to stop a shot from the striker Musemic on the line. It was a small miracle that the only casualty was the Sarajevo winger Prodanovic. He left after half an hour.
Stepney’s goal was besieged in the second half but the defence – the polished young Scot Francis Burns (keeping Shay Brennan out of the team) and David Sadler (replacing the injured Nobby Stiles) – made the vital tackles and held their nerve. John Fitzpatrick, whose career would end prematurely when he injured his leg, also gave us some iron. Bill Foulkes was, well, Bill Foulkes, the same old piece of English granite.
This was no gradual re-introduction to the more competitive edge of the European Cup. We were back in the middle of the type of battle we had lost in Belgrade two years earlier, but this time we headed off the ambush. There were no goals, only the prospect of another highly physical collision at Old Trafford. No one was disappointed.
My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography Page 23