The Bosnians, if anything, were even harder when the bell rang a second time. Three Sarajevo players were booked and the midfielder Prljaca was sent off for chopping down George Best, a fate that could also have befallen the victim when he lashed out at the goalkeeper, Muftik. Fortunately for us, George escaped – and proceeded to send us through, putting in a cross that could only be pushed to the feet of John Aston who scored, then scoring himself in the sixty-third minute.
It said everything about the Sarajevo effort that they refused to accept that their massive and, it has to be said, unscrupulous application had failed, Delalic scoring with just two minutes to go. In the dressing room we all agreed we were relieved to have survived tackling which the Old Man described as ‘the most disgraceful I have ever seen’ – and also any disciplinary action following some scuffling in the tunnel, when some of the emotions of two fierce games came surging to the surface.
It was rarely easy fighting on Europe’s Eastern front, and the draw committed us to another exercise in survival. Katowice, home of Gornik Zabrze in the Silesian coalfields of Poland, was the next challenging venue. It was said, correctly, that even in March the wind there could feel as though it had blown all the way from Siberia.
Only once before had we known such demanding conditions in European action – at the start of our last campaign, against Vorwaerts in East Berlin. That was a Denis Law night. He scored one, brilliantly, and made another for John Connelly. It had been bleak going through Checkpoint Charlie, Frank McGhee, the Daily Mirror sportswriter, lightening the mood only briefly when he signed an entry form at the border in the name of James Bond, but it scarcely prepared us for the conditions over which Denis prevailed so memorably at the Walter Ulbrecht stadium.
He was missing, however, in Poland where we had to defend a 2–0 lead given to us at Old Trafford by a Gornik own goal and one from Brian Kidd just a minute from the end. This might not sound like the toughest of challenges, but we carried a lot of apprehension into the tough industrial city of Katowice, which is invariably the location for key Polish international matches because of the frenzied support supplied by the coal miners. In winter they warmed themselves on heated vodka.
No one felt the edge of tension more than the Old Man. He had always been superb at disguising his deepest feelings when he knew the world was looking at him, but the tension he carried visibly was probably inevitable. He was just three matches away from his great goal, a European Cup final that would be played, so helpfully for us, at Wembley. This was a fact which made it all the more unthinkable that we should stumble at this rugged outpost of the game – but of course we did think about it, and it didn’t help when we looked out of the window of the bus carrying us from the airport and saw huddled figures in ice-bound streets.
We also knew that Kidd’s late goal had given us a flattering win in the first leg. The Gornik defence had played with great resolution, and if George’s shot hadn’t flown in off a Polish body after an hour our increasingly desperate assaults on their goal might well have been contained. There was no question the Poles could play with bite and skill, and in Włodzimierz Lubanski they had one of the world game’s most celebrated forwards. At Old Trafford he had been a brooding threat; in front of his adoring public, we feared he might well produce more.
The concern of some of the lads stretched to the food that would be offered at the hotel. They had brought little stoves to warm up cans of soup, a decision which proved embarrassing when we were fed perfectly adequately in the big dining room. However, there was no doubting the chief menace to our progress into the semi-finals – the cold that froze the thought processes as well as the limbs, plus a pitch surface that made almost every basic move a kind of Polish roulette.
We were shocked when we saw the pitch on the eve of the game. The snow had been crushed flat and into a hard pack. Matt Busby agonised over whether to press for a postponement, but the view of some players – which was expressed most strongly by Paddy Crerand and had my agreement – was that if conditions were indeed extremely difficult they would probably suit us better than Gornik. It was they who had to force the issue, get the ball into our net at least twice, and when you tested the pitch you realised immediately that it was a virtually hopeless task, even for a player of Lubanski’s skills.
In the cruel wind, that view was soon confirmed. Moving the ball from one end of the pitch to the other took an age, and almost invariably moves broke down as one forward after another fell or slid out of control when challenged by a defender.
Lubanski became increasingly frustrated as the fans cheered hopefully whenever he touched the ball, but for him all contact was brief and fruitless. With Bill Foulkes missing, much was expected of David Sadler when he moved back alongside Nobby Stiles, and he met the challenge superbly – as did all of a defence in which Francis Burns was continuing to impress with his speed and neat touch. When the Poles scored, after seventy minutes, it was from one moment of defensive breakdown, Alex Stepney being penalised for obstruction in the box and Lubanski’s striking partner Lentner running on to the free kick. It meant twenty minutes of intense pressure as the wind cut through us, but, fortunately, Gornik had had their moment of penetration.
I discovered that the night offered one last threat to some peaceful sleep when I finally went to my hotel room, warm at last, in the early hours of the morning. Almost immediately, the phone rang. It was my friend and accountant, Reuben Kay, who had joined us on the trip. His voice was agitated when he told me, ‘Bobby, somebody’s after me. My phone keeps ringing and when I pick it up someone keeps saying, Comrade Ten, Comrade Ten.’ I went to Reuben’s room, calmed him down a little and took him to the reception desk in the hotel. It didn’t take long to identify the problem. The culprit was someone seeking George Best’s autograph. He had got hold of the wrong room number.
It was a small reminder of how football, back when the Berlin Wall seemed like a permanent statement about the divisions of Europe and the world, had the power to draw people together, however confusingly at times. Recently, when a Russian intelligence man was poisoned in London, I was reminded of Reuben’s anxiety in the small hours of the Polish night – and also of another curious affair that came at around that time, after the BBC rang me up one day to say that one of their Russian correspondents was anxious to meet me. They wondered if I could give him a few hours of my time. I said that I was going to watch a match at Burnley that night; if he cared to catch a plane, I would pick him up at the airport and take him to Turf Moor. We could talk on the journey and at the match.
When his interviewing was done, the Russian said, ‘I know you’re going to see your friend, the great goalkeeper Lev Yashin in Moscow when you play in his testimonial match, and I wonder if you could give him a present from me?’ It seemed a little odd, but when I agreed he handed me a pen. I never knew a pen could be so heavy, and I thought to myself, ‘Well, what am I going to do now?’ I didn’t want to make any kind of fuss; Lev was a personal friend and I worried that I might cause him some embarrassment in those Cold War days by going to the police with this strange object. So I took the ‘pen’ to Moscow, though not without a twinge of misgiving, and duly presented it to the great man. It was curious that when I explained it came from a Russian BBC man in London, he didn’t say a word, just slipped it into his pocket, almost as though it was something he had expected. But from whom? Could it possibly have been M?
Unlike Frank McGhee of the Daily Mirror, however, I had no yearnings for a career in espionage, a fact which struck me again on another visit to Moscow. I received a call from a Russian, who said, ‘My friends and I want to arrange a meeting with you.’ I told him that, as he knew where I was staying, he should come down to my hotel. ‘Oh, no,’ he replied. ‘We want to see you outside the Bolshoi Ballet.’ I declined, quite sensibly I think.
For some time playing football in Eastern Europe had been both an adventure and a mystery. Moscow, Belgrade, Budapest, Prague, Warsaw, they were fascinating pla
ces if you wanted to venture, however carefully, into another world. My charming and somewhat eccentric friend, Geoffrey Green of The Times, perhaps did it with less care than most of his colleagues or the players of Manchester United and England. Sometimes he arrived at an airport, almost invariably dressed in his Russian old leather coat, carrying not much more than his prized banjo. Once, though, he took this to the extreme when he arrived in Budapest without a passport. The Hungarian officials were aghast that someone in those days had expected to walk into their tightly secured country without even a slip of paper to say who he was. Of course, he was the talk of the airport bus that back then would carry both the players and those who wrote about them – but one of his colleagues, who was at the time muttering that this was so typical of Geoffrey, was soon quite shocked when he looked out of the window. There, flying past us, was a government limousine – with the football correspondent of The Times sitting serenely in the back seat.
Geoffrey Green was one of those characters who bring a little spice to life. For someone like me, who always, whether successfully or not, tried to do what I thought was expected of me, he was operating on a rather different planet. He went his own way, in his own style, but one of the things I always liked about him was his obvious passion for football. It showed in his beautiful writing and conversation, which might occasionally be quirky but was always filled with warmth and humour.
Once, on a long flight from South America, I wandered to the back of the plane in search of a cup of tea. As was often the case, my team-mates were sleeping while I fidgeted in my seat, bored or a little tense depending on my mood and the quality of the flight. Geoffrey was in the galley and he wasn’t drinking tea. He was sipping a whisky and was plainly in a very good mood. ‘Bobby,’ he said, ‘can you believe I’m sixty and my young wife is going to give me my first child! I want you to be the godparent.’ I said I would be honoured, even though I didn’t quite know what godfathers were supposed to do. Geoffrey duly named my goddaughter Ti, because he had referred to her as It before she was born, which even Geoffrey knew wouldn’t do for a young lady.
Once at a football writer’s dinner his speech was very short. He simply produced a record player and put on Louis Armstrong, one of his favourites, intoning, ‘What a wonderful world’. His presence always helped to make it so – and he could certainly have played it again on the hot, tense night in Madrid when Manchester United finally fought their way through to the final of the European Cup.
We led 1–0 from the first leg, with a fine goal from George Best, but even though Real were no longer the force that had swept beyond us eleven years earlier in another semi-final, with Gento their only surviving player of the great team, the narrow advantage left us uneasy. Denis Law had briefly returned to the European theatre that night, but he knew he was fighting a losing battle against a knee injury, and after the game he had been told he needed to go to hospital for an operation. For the away leg, the versatile David Sadler took Denis’s place in the forward line and Bill Foulkes was brought back to the middle of defence. From the Old Man came the eternal advice: play naturally, pass accurately – and, above all, play without fear.
The best advice in the world would have counted for nothing, however, if Nobby Stiles had not simply refused to be beaten. His defiance grew through this most vital of games to an extraordinary degree and before the end, decisively, it had touched us all.
Two years earlier he had become a hero of the nation when he brilliantly curbed the threat of Portugal’s Eusebio in a World Cup semi-final. That was the performance that persuaded our team-mate George Cohen that the Football Association should make a video and offer it to all young players as a classic lesson in how to defend. Now, in the Bernabeu, Nobby produced something more than a technical masterpiece. He persuaded all of us that defeat simply wasn’t an option, and he did it from a position that, from any other perspective but his own, would have looked pretty hopeless.
It was not just that we were 3–1 down at half time. Amancio, the hero of a crowd of 125,000, was running free. He was also arrogant to the point of provocation, needling us and playing to a great gallery that greeted his every touch with the most excited anticipation. Later Nobby revealed that his taming of Amancio – the key to the game – was not entirely legal.
He reported that after the Real player had kicked him, off the ball and without a word from the Italian referee, he had taken football law into his own hands, throwing a punch that escaped the attention of the officials – if not the booing crowd – and rattled the Real star. I didn’t see the punch, but Nobby said that one of our team-mates’ reactions could just be heard above the din: ‘Fucking hell, Nob,’ he exclaimed. Nobby’s contribution amounted to so much more than one piece of villainy, which he justified by saying that he had feared he might break down with injury at any moment because his leg was tightening a little more each minute with the effects of the illicit kick. Nobby had had heat treatment at half time, but he was concerned that Amancio’s speed might embarrass him in the second half, and that the Spaniard’s advantage had been created quite unfairly. It was a version of football justice to which no one in our dressing room, perhaps not surprisingly, could raise an objection.
We were desperate at half time, really quite distraught after seeing our lead vanish under goals from Pirri, Gento and Amancio, with our only riposte an own goal forced off the defender Zoco. Matt Busby buried his own feelings of disappointment, insisting that we could get back into the game. He kept pointing out that on aggregate we were only one goal down. His encouragement wasn’t all that comforting when we thought about what faced us: a Real side made confident by their goals and the extraordinary level of support from the vast crowd. Their cockiness was underlined as we walked back down the tunnel to the pitch. Some of the Real players, with Gento involved, made it clear that they considered the game won and there was something of a confrontation, with Nobby, naturally, to the fore.
He was magnificently defiant. The man who was christened Happy because of his tendency to moan would not let us feel sorry for ourselves. Despite his injury worry, he made a series of brilliant tackles, and that changed the entire mood of the game. Suddenly, we were thinking, ‘The little sod is winning everything’ – and the opposition were beginning to argue among themselves. At half time, when the Old Man had said we needed only to score one goal, we had nodded our agreement – but had thought, ‘Oh, yes, boss, but have you noticed how they are playing?’ Now we were beginning to feel differently, although the immense heat was a constant worry.
When David Sadler, who had been pushed forward in pursuit of the aggregate equaliser, scored twenty minutes into the second half, the Bernabeu fell into a shocked silence. It was a softish goal – it only rolled into the net – but its impact could not have been greater. Nobby was emphatic now, ‘Come on, come on, you bastards!’ he shouted. ‘We can win it now, we’ve just got to keep the focus.’
He was right, of course, but saying it is not always the same as doing it, even though there was no doubt that we were now in charge. Just before we had equalised, the ball ran out of play to the little wall that kept the crowd back. One fan picked it up as I ran, obviously in a hurry, to retrieve. The Spanish supporter went to send the ball away from me down the line, which, with no ball-boy around, would have lost precious time that was becoming more vital by the second. I said to myself, ‘Just keep it cool, just walk …’ It was quite strange really. As I slowed and walked towards him, he kept the ball in his hands. Then, when I reached the wall, he just handed it to me.
It was one of those little psychological moments that can be so important at a vital stage of a game. My fear was that if I’d kept running, the fan would have kicked the ball away, and with me chasing after it, everybody would have thought we were panicking. It was the last thing we should do. Nobby had convinced us that we could still win.
Three minutes after Sadler’s equaliser, George took the ball down the right side to the dead-ball line. I was run
ning in from behind as he pulled the ball back into the box, and as I looked across I saw a red shirt. My instinct was, ‘This is a chance.’ Then, in a flash, I saw that the person on the end of the pass was not Brian Kidd or David Sadler or John Aston. Of all people, it was Bill Foulkes – the granite man, the rock of the defence, but unquestionably the last man any of us wanted to see running on to a George Best cross twelve minutes from the end of a match that could possibly destroy, one last time, our chances of ever winning the European Cup.
How can I describe one of the most important goals I would ever see? Maybe Bill will settle for ‘exquisite’. Those of us who expected to see the ball balloon high on to the terraces behind the goal were instantly heaped in shame. Not only did Bill Foulkes score, he looked like a striker of the ages, tucking in his shot so easily, so unanswerably, that the goalkeeper Betancort, who had shown brilliant reflexes in the first game at Old Trafford, could scarcely move.
Foulkes was buried in red shirts led by Nobby Stiles.
Later, I was unable to join Norma and my friend, Dave Thomas, the golfer, and his wife, for a dinner of celebration. I couldn’t move from my room because of a bad case of dehydration. The conditions had been so humid, and in those days they didn’t let the players have water. Today’s footballers are overwhelmed with water bottles, but back then you were obliged to carry on and hope you didn’t collapse in extreme conditions. When the final whistle went I fell to the turf. I couldn’t muster the energy to kiss it, but I did think, at a moment I would never forget, ‘It’s ours now. We are going to win the European Cup.’
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THE EUROPEAN CUP FINAL, 1968
My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography Page 24