It was a beautiful feeling. It was triumph and deliverance all wrapped into one, but the deepest emotion would take a little time to well up. For the moment we had enough to do in getting to the finish. The contest was over, but we still had to play out the time. We still had to drag our bodies around and forget how much had been drained from us this night.
When the final whistle went my strongest sensation was worry for the Old Man. He really was, I felt, an old man. He had been through so much, and this was unquestionably the pinnacle of his football life. For days he had been reminded of the meaning of the game, the legacy of Munich and how his boys had died in pursuit of this trophy. So many people believed that this night was for him and about him, and it was natural, I suppose, that everyone wanted to touch him at the end of the game.
When I got through to the Old Man, a great crowd of people, including some supporters, were holding on to him. Even though I was so tired, I started to drag them off, one by one. ‘Get off, give him some room!’ I yelled. Later I thought that was maybe a little bit rude because the fans only wanted to express their happiness, but I was concerned that he was being buffeted one way and then another.
Eventually, he got to his players and hugged them. To be perfectly honest, I cannot tell you precisely my feelings at that moment. Fatigue certainly. I do recall what it meant to embrace team-mates like Bill Foulkes, Nobby Stiles and Shay Brennan, who had been involved in this quest for so long – and maybe especially Bill because, like me, he had been on the snowy airfield and seen Matt Busby down and his team, our friends, destroyed.
I know there was an understanding that something was over, something that had dominated our lives for so long. I walked to the dressing room and drank two bottles of beer, downing them in a rush, one after the other.
21
GATHERING STORM CLOUDS
I WOULD HAVE been wiser to seek out the water that had been denied us out on that sweltering field, but when somebody reached out with a bottle and said, ‘Here, Bobby, have a beer,’ I took it gratefully. I thought, ‘Right now I’d drink anything.’ There was an unfortunate consequence, however. As soon as Norma and I got to our room in the Russell Hotel, where the greatest celebration of all my time at Manchester United was about to unfold, I fainted.
It was exactly as it had been in Madrid after the semi-final. Repeatedly, I tried to fight off the effects of dehydration and also, maybe, the huge accumulation of feelings that had built up in me, but each time I thought I had steadied myself, I fainted again.
Finally, I said to Norma, ‘You’ll have to go downstairs, because there are so many people celebrating and it will look strange if I’m not there. I want to be with them so much, but look, I can’t walk to the door. I’ll lie down for five minutes, and as soon as I can I’ll join you.’
Later, Nobby – who eventually went off to Danny La Rue’s club, a favourite place of his, with Shay Brennan – speculated that really my problem was an emotional overload, that maybe I couldn’t trust myself to cope with so many deep private thoughts and memories on such a public occasion, washed in champagne and illuminated by a thousand camera flashes.
When I thought about it, I could understand why Nobby might think that – and it was true he had come to know me very well over the years – but the facts were plain enough. Three times I got off the bed to face the world, three times I went to the door with the best of intentions – and three times I fainted and had to pick myself off the floor. I wasn’t alarmed, however. I just thought this is how it is when you reach the end of something so important to you, and when you are utterly drained physically. Later, Pat Crerand said that he had been much the same. He, too, could hardly trust himself to put one foot in front of the other.
When Norma came back to the room, she said that there were many old United players down there in the big, lushly carpeted room beneath the chandeliers, and added, ‘They were all wanting to see you.’ This made me a little sad, especially when I recalled the saying of Joe Mercer, who declared with a glass of champagne in his hand, ‘Footballers should always celebrate their victories … you never know when the next one is coming.’
Mercer’s philosophical warning was to prove particularly appropriate to me as the next few years confirmed the suspicion that if we were ever going to be crowned champions of Europe, it had to happen in that spring of 1968. Lying in that hotel room, however, none of that concerned me. Although I know I would have enjoyed the celebrations downstairs, the pats on the back, being the centre of attention, in truth it wasn’t that important. What mattered, deep down, was that I’d taken the chance to fulfil my dream when it had been given to me.
Certainly I was pretty sure how I would feel in the morning. We had done something that ninety-nine per cent of players could only fantasise about. It was the last chapter of an amazing story and one I knew, in my thirty-first year, would never be surpassed in my playing career.
People still ask me what the dominant feeling was when I travelled to our West End hotel from Wembley Stadium. Honestly, it was more than anything complete exhaustion, but maybe that is only part of the truth. Maybe deep down there was that other sense, one that said that even if we hadn’t drawn a line under the past, in some ways closed the door on it – which of course could never be done completely – at least something important had indeed changed. Perhaps it allowed us, finally, to think that in the future, however much of it was left to us as players contending for the great trophies, we were now responsible for ourselves and not those we’d so tragically left behind.
Nobby and I missed the great homecoming, the scenes of joy in Albert Square, Manchester, in front of the town hall. We had to report for England, which, speaking for myself, was in some ways a relief.
Just as I had been relieved after Munich that I did not have to experience the ordeal of the funerals, of saying farewell to so many friends in public and in a state of mind where I couldn’t really begin to trust my emotions, maybe there was an echo of that when Nobby and I said farewell to our United team-mates and told them to give our regards to our happy old town. The guts of the story had been played out.
Certainly the feeling of satisfaction had indeed come with the dawn, and the knowledge that we had accomplished our mission and it was all that I had hoped it would be. If I stripped away all the history, the special circumstances that had been rooted in my thoughts for so long, I was still left with something that any professional would treasure for the rest of his days. Eleven years after that first collision with the great Real Madrid, I was a champion of Europe.
The great thing was that we had got there after all those disappointments. All those anguished thoughts about what might have happened if, say, two years earlier the Partizan goalkeeper had not made that great save from Denis Law, could be put away once and for all time. We had done the job that had been asked of us, and that we had demanded from ourselves, and now we had to move to another phase of our football lives. That it would prove to be something far from what we might have hoped when the champagne corks popped in the Russell Hotel was something we coped with on some days better than others.
However, running through every game I played, every choked-back bout of frustration, was an enduring sense that I was one of the last men in the game with any reason to complain about whatever cards might be dealt me. You take the best, you do as Joe Mercer said, you celebrate it and store it against the worst the future can bring, and then you always play the game as well as you can.
For me, playing the game was in itself the greatest reward, the biggest incentive to face another day on the balls of my feet. Winning trophies would only ever be a bonus. As long as I could say that – and it would be so for another few years – I could live with the downside of the glory, the truth, as Geoffrey Green was never shy of citing, that into every life a little rain must fall. It just happened that the two games we played early in the new season, against the Argentine side Estudiantes in the World Club Championship, added up to a bit of a torrent.
Many felt that, in view of the state of Anglo-Argentina football relations after the scarring of the World Cup quarter-final, the Old Man would have been wise to have turned down the chance to win a title that for many was at best an irrelevance and at worst a potential ambush of football values – a situation produced almost entirely by the long failure of the European and South American football cultures to come to any solid ground of mutual understanding.
Twenty-four years later, at a Fifa committee shortly before the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea, I learned there had been a frightening lack of progress against cheating and unfair practices. Indeed, there was a widening disregard for what I have always thought of as the fundamentals of the game when it is played properly: respect for the game, yourselves and your opponents. Sepp Blatter, the president, said to about twenty former players gathered around a big table, ‘We’ve got another World Cup coming up in a few months’ time. Could any of you tell me what you most want to see to make it a good tournament?’
There was silence around the table until I pressed the button for the translation and said, ‘One thing I would like to see is players not trying to get each other in trouble by feigning injury, by diving in the eighteen-yard box and holding on to each other – if we could rid the World Cup of this type of behaviour it would be a tremendous start. As an ex-player I hate to see these things. They are spoiling football for everyone, and especially all those fans who support the game … stopping this is what I would most like to see.’
An old South American player said, ‘But, Bobby, don’t you think, as a professional, that if we can get away with creating an advantage for our own side, we really should be applauded?’ Sepp Blatter steered us away from a confrontation, saying, ‘Let’s stick to the rules,’ and moved the discussion on from a subject that was guaranteed to cause major division, and possibly a serious row.
We can be sure the late Jock Stein would not have been surprised by the exchange. He tried to persuade his friend Matt Busby to abandon the idea that United should follow in the footsteps of his Celtic team, who twelve months earlier, and after their brilliant European Cup victory over Internazionale Milan, had been involved in two riotous games with the South American champions Racing Club of Buenos Aires. Stein railed against the kicking and the spitting his players had been exposed to, with scarcely a hint of protection from the referee. The Old Man valued hugely the opinions of Stein, but in his ideal of a world of football that flew beyond borders, and prejudice, he was still unshakeable. Even after a scouting mission to Argentina which proved to be terribly uncomfortable – he picked up a bug and spent almost the entire flight home locked in the tiny toilet cubicle – Matt Busby was emphatic. The adventure must go on. Unfortunately, the adventure was almost exclusively an ordeal, both in Buenos Aires, where we played the first leg, and then at Old Trafford.
Nobby Stiles was ranked second only to Alf Ramsey (following the manager’s charge that Argentina had played like animals against England in the World Cup) as a leading public enemy in the view of fanatic elements of that football-mad nation, and he bore the brunt of the hostility when we arrived in South America. As he has ruefully recalled down the years, the Argentine fans had produced a series of banners for their greeting to us. One said, ‘Denis Law – El Rey [the King]’. Another declared, ‘George Best – El Beatle’. Nor did I have any reason for complaint. My banner said, ‘Bobby Charlton – El Campeón [the Champion]’. Nobby was much less pleased when he saw, ‘Nobby Stiles – El Bandido’.
Nobby growled, ‘Fucking charming,’ as he climbed into the team bus to a chorus of catcalls and boos. He knew, like the rest of us, that Jock Stein’s reservations were almost certainly about to be confirmed. It wasn’t as though the World Club Championship was exactly a glittering prize; it was a novelty then, and it is still something quite marginal all these years later. Still, the Old Man insisted we could get through it successfully, and that if we helped to give the trophy some significance, it would in the end be for the good of the game. My feeling was, ‘Well, the boss seems to want this, and if we’re involved we might as well make the best of it – and win another trophy.’
I hadn’t been to Argentina before and so many people who had were telling me, ‘You’re heading for the most hostile place any footballer could go.’ But then I thought, ‘It’s something we’ll get used to.’ Soon enough, though, we realised that this would not be a formality. I had to have three stitches after a kick on the shin from a defender we had christened Dracula but, as anticipated, the real nightmare was Nobby’s. He acquitted himself with great discipline, and application to the play, despite all kinds of provocation, including a head butt from Carlos Bilardo, who would later coach Argentina to their World Cup win in Mexico in 1986.
The way the script was shaping it was probably inevitable that Nobby would be sent off, though in the event the circumstances were quite shocking. The dismissal was a complete injustice in view of all that had gone on before. The referee didn’t give us any protection, and nothing in the way of 50–50 decisions, and Nobby no doubt reached breaking point in the second half when he made a perfect run through an offside trap to pick up a pass from Paddy Crerand. Though the linesman’s flag stayed down, the referee immediately blew for offside. Nobby protested and gestured towards the linesman, then turned to me and said, ‘We’ll get nowt out of this.’ The referee called Nobby to him and asked him what he had said. It was then that my friend sealed his own fate. He said in my direction, ‘He can’t fucking see and now it turns out he can’t hear.’
On the journey home it seemed fair to congratulate ourselves on bringing away a deficit no worse than a single goal and, even though we would be missing Nobby in the second leg, we had to be confident that we could outplay them at Old Trafford.
This belief was supported by some striking circumstantial evidence. It seemed that the transatlantic flight had worked a remarkable transformation on the disposition of Estudiantes. They were staying near my house in Lymm and all the locals seemed to be agreed: the Argentinian players were perfect gentlemen. They posed for pictures with local schoolchildren, and waved and smiled whenever they left their hotel. One Lymm resident wondered, ‘What’s all this nonsense about them being thugs and animals – really, they are lovely.’ One of them came round to my house with a photographer from the Manchester Evening News. He suggested that it would be good for the match if we proved that really the players of both sides were, despite what happened in Buenos Aires, quite the best of friends. I posed for a picture including Norma and the girls as we received a ‘delegation’ in our front garden. We were presented with flags. It was all so amiable there might have been a temptation to forget, at least to some extent, quite how hard it had been in South America, how hopeless the prospect of making a worthwhile game had so quickly become.
Then the second leg started and the first thing that happened was ‘whack’. They were coming at us again with all that unscrupulous fury they had displayed back home in the Boca stadium. Once again we were plunged into mayhem. From the point of view of winning the game, as opposed to avoiding a full-scale riot, Ramon Veron (the father of Juan Sebastian Veron, the wonderfully skilled player who was never able to deliver his best in his short stay at Old Trafford) put us in a critical position after just six minutes. Veron was known as ‘the Witch’ in Argentina and it was not hard to understand why. Like his son, he had tremendous skill – indeed it seems like a South American birthright – and he also had an equally freely distributed mean streak. Estudiantes had caught us on the break, as we pursued the aggregate equaliser, and Veron coolly put the ball past Alex Stepney.
In the hands of a Yugoslav referee, the game never quite descended to the depths of violence and skullduggery seen in Buenos Aires, but it was plain enough that neither team would finish with eleven players. George Best was sent off, with the defender Medina, in the last minutes, a fact which overshadowed Willie Morgan’s late goal and filled the following day’s newspapers wi
th headlines about soccer scandal and shame. Had a reporter been in the tunnel, there would have been even more substance to the claims that inter-continental club football was probably an irredeemably dangerous enterprise. Nobby Stiles, who was sitting in the stands, reported that he rushed down to the dressing room when, at the final whistle, he saw the big Estudiantes goalkeeper Poletti dashing off the field with what seemed like the clear intention of challenging George, but by the time Nobby got down to the tunnel his role as protector had already been taken, not for the first time, by Paddy Crerand. Paddy, who was proud to have come from one of Glasgow’s harder schools of self-protection, was attacking the goalkeeper with some relish. By now, the Old Man was no doubt reflecting on the wisdom of his South American adventure. He stepped in between the combatants, sighed, and said, ‘That’s enough of that, Paddy.’
For Matt Busby, as he headed into a season that would see us finish a deeply mediocre eleventh in the First Division, knocked out of the FA Cup in the sixth round by the rising power of Alan Ball’s Everton, and lose our grip on the European Cup in the semi-finals against AC Milan, it may well have been the moment when he finally decided that maybe he had had enough.
It was around this time that he surprised me one day with an invitation to join him on a golf trip to Scotland. There was a Bing Crosby tournament at Turnberry, he said, and he would like to go up for a few days. To me, it was almost unthinkable that a player should go off with the manager like this, but he was insistent and I couldn’t see that I had any alternative but to say yes. I socialised with the Old Man much less than some of the other senior players, but I had never refused a request from him throughout all my days at Old Trafford either, and it plainly wasn’t the time to start. We had been together so long now, and I got the impression that he had a lot on his mind. What it mostly was, I learned soon enough, and it confirmed that earlier suspicion of mine that deep down he had become drained and made weary by the constant need to be setting standards – and winning trophies. Maybe victory in the European Cup had indeed signalled to him that his active life’s work had reached a natural point of closure.
My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography Page 26