Bryan Robson goes into my midfield because he was simply a great player, one whose spirit and ability were never diminished by his many serious injuries. You would want Bryan because of the sheer quality of his competitive character; the other skills – the tackling, the goal scoring, the inspiration – were all bonuses which carry him into my team alongside Roy Keane. Between them, they would squeeze the will out of the opposition.
Cantona is not the easiest choice when you think of the ability of men like Dennis Viollet and Liam Whelan who so dazzled the emerging Brazilian masters, but the Frenchman goes in because maybe no one ever seized a time, and an opportunity, at the end of a previously flawed career quite so perfectly as when he set the young Lions of Old Trafford on their way. As I said earlier, for reasons that may have been embedded in his background in French football, he never excelled in Europe, but in England for a while he was both king and puppet-master.
The fans of today may wonder about the absence of such as Paul Scholes, my model footballer, Ryan Giggs, David Beckham, Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo, but they are still playing and, certainly in the case of Rooney and Ronaldo, have time left to define their careers fully. Some accounts, which were closed long ago, just cannot be forgotten – or surpassed. It is why Duncan Edwards, George Best and Denis Law walk into my team.
Now, when I look at the list, and the notes and scratchings in and out that accompanied it, I feel the strongest surge of pride. It comes from the fact that all of them wore the shirt that became the badge of my life – and that on any given day I would back them to beat anyone in the world.
EPILOGUE
THERE IS, I’VE always known, a point in every man’s story where you cannot escape the truth, and maybe I’ve reached it now. I’m still looking to the good years that I hope are left to me, but also have to accept, as reluctantly as a boy who never wanted an adventure to end, that so much I have considered valuable, even indispensable, to my happiness has to be let go.
It is not that sensations like playing against Alfredo di Stefano and Ferenc Puskas, and alongside Denis Law and George Best, or feeling the blast of the crowd on a big night at Old Trafford or some other great stadium in Europe with Nobby Stiles chivvying at your back, are in any way disposable. They are too thrilling and timeless for that. But when you consider all that you have seen and experienced since these were the staples of your life, and all the miles you have covered, you have to wonder: hasn’t the road gone far enough?
No, I’m not saying I am about to resign from the board of Manchester United, or that suddenly I’m going to find it easy to turn down a request to fly to Nairobi or Sarajevo, Johannesburg or São Paulo, and be able, at least one more time, to marvel at the power of football to enter the spirit and the language of every nation on earth. If you gave me the chance, I would probably argue for ever that in the sweep of its appeal, its ability to touch every corner of humanity, football is the only game that needed to be invented. But a man can make the point only so many times, just as he can get on only so many airplanes. There is surely a moment when he has to see that he should, as the great golfer Walter Hagen once advised, pause and smell the flowers.
This thought came to me quite strongly while locked in a Brazilian traffic jam – always a colourful affair, no doubt, but the kind which makes you think a little about how most sensibly to apportion some of the time left to you.
So much of it is owed to my wife Norma, my daughters, and my three grandchildren: Suzanne’s Robert and Andrea’s William and Emma; they have all given me a multitude of reasons for pride. Sometimes I think I should spend rather more time displaying this feeling that comes to me in some distant corner of the world and gives me a sudden yearning to be home.
Already I’ve had young Robert out on the Old Trafford pitch for a few minutes, just for him to get a feeling of the place. However, though he has shown talent for sport, including the display of a good golf swing and tennis stroke, no one will insist more fervently than his grandfather that his life is his own.
Sometimes I’m asked if I ever regret the fact that I never had a son, that there was no Bobby Junior with whom to kick around a ball in the back garden. My reaction is that you have to be rather conceited to think in such terms. I was given two girls and they have been the most precious of gifts. Ask for a lad? No, you do not ask for a boy, any more than you ask for the moon. You get what you are given and you thank God.
Suzanne was always fascinated by the weather. Norma and I sometimes wondered why; maybe it was because she went to school quite near Manchester airport, but who really knew except this determined young girl who announced she wanted to be a meteorologist? This meant, she pointed out, Reading University, which specialised in the subject. She studied pure mathematics and physics, and after joining the Ministry of Defence, which had been in charge of predicting the weather since the Second World War, she was sent on a special course in Germany, where she learned about how the layers of weather affect flying. She came back determined to learn how to fly herself, and though, because her job changed, she didn’t take her pilot’s licence, she did fly solo from the famous Battle of Britain station Biggin Hill. Eventually, she appeared on television for a while and our pride in her career was never diminished by suggestions that her place in the public eye had something to do with her family connection. Like any indignant father would, I pointed out that my girl was a qualified scientist.
Andrea went to university in Nottingham and then business school in London. She was just as emphatic as Suzanne about what she wanted to do: she wanted to be a high-powered businesswoman, and she landed a good job with Canon, the giant camera and film firm. However, she became frustrated working on budgets that were not always implemented, and wasn’t happy with her life, so she decided to do something different. She went to Manchester University and got a second degree. Now she is a qualified physiotherapist and enjoys her work as she never could in a business suit. In the end this, I believe, is what you want most for your children: an understanding that life is not something to submit to, but a challenge you must try to shape by your own efforts in some activity that truly interests you.
I suspect that I have made it clear enough in these pages that in my case football was more than even a vocation – it was a compulsion. Now, when for one last time I try to capture for you the meaning of all that part of my life so strongly interwoven with Manchester United, I see something more clearly than ever before. I see that if football has been my joy and my expression and sometimes my pain, it has also been my vehicle for understanding that other people’s lives and achievements do not receive the kind of attention paid to a spectacular goal in a big football match. I have had experiences that have carried me far beyond the boundaries of the games we play. When I say this I think of meeting men like Scotty Lee in Sarajevo and Peter Karanja in the second worst slum in Africa. I think of the commitment they have made to people much less fortunate than themselves, and how they do this day in, day out. In those moments of reflection I am grateful to football because, among all its other gifts, it has enabled me in recent years to help such men at least a little in their efforts to give a chance to young people who, without their efforts, would have nowhere to turn.
Scotty Lee drove a relief truck through the Bosnian mountains at that time when Sarajevo was a shooting gallery for snipers and artillery men whose job was to terrorise the population of a city I knew only as the place where I once played a fierce European Cup tie. Scotty saw a young woman pushing a pram go down under sniper fire, he saw the remnants of massacre, he saw the horror brought to ordinary people who wanted only a decent life. Because of this he stayed behind and did what he could to both heal the wounds and prevent new ones. Through football, Scotty’s campaigning is to befriend young people and teach them how to identify and avoid the landmines which are still either ending or wrecking so many young lives. Through the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation, I have been able to help, in the company of the Romanian tennis star Ilie Nasta
se, to throw a little spotlight on to work which otherwise might go unnoticed. It has been a great privilege, and is one I place alongside getting involved with what might easily be described as the most remarkable football club in the world, Mathere United of Nairobi.
Unaided by the Kenyan Football Association, Mathere has become more than a football club, they have become a symbol of hope for young people across great swathes of Africa brought so low by Aids and hunger and desperate poverty. They won the Kenyan league title, playing exuberant, joyful football, a force rising from the bleakest of possibilities; they pushed into Tanzania and Uganda; last year they were nominated for a Nobel Prize. They have given me images which no one could forget, not least of an immaculately dressed young man emerging from a slum, beaming with pride that he was part of something that brought the real hope of achievement.
Nearer home, the work of Macclesfield Town in holding clinics to fight depression among young people, a terrible scourge which has resulted in so many lost lives through suicides and drug abuse, is another example of how football can be a force for good. Laureus have put some money into the Macclesfield project, which has helped them to employ a group of counsellors. Broken marriage and indebtedness are some of the causes of despair, and where else can a young person go for quick and significant help beyond maybe ten minutes with some overworked GP? At Macclesfield Football Club that need is being supplied, and when I saw the effect of the effort, how comfortable young people were in going to the local football club, I said to a board meeting at Old Trafford, ‘If Macclesfield can do it, I’m sure Manchester United can.’ Now we do, and the response has been tremendous.
I do not wish to glorify or exaggerate my role in such magnificent work. My point is that if football has given me so much down all the years, not the least of its gifts has been an ability to put a little back into a world which has often dazzled me with its rewards. When I ran past that stand of mining implements in the primary school in Ashington, in a bright crimson jersey with a miner’s helmet under my arm, I couldn’t know those dreams I had in my young head would quickly pale into insignificance against the reality of what lay before me. I have met kings and presidents – and Nelson Mandela – for no better reason than that I was able to play football, to do that which was presented as a gift. I’ve been to every corner of the world and felt the affection, even the love, of those who see in football something that has brought enrichment and thrills to their lives.
So, of course, as long as I’m strong and energetic enough, there will be days when I put aside the slippers and old gardening sweater, and go off to some new assignment, some lingering part of the legacy that I was able to make for myself as a young man on the football field. In the meantime, there will be other days when maybe I take out a bottle of the good wine that Norma has stored away for special occasions, and toast all of those who I have known and loved, and played for and alongside.
Munich, as I have already made plain, will always be included in my recall of the best and the worst of my times; everything that has happened in the last fifty years of my life has been conditioned in some way by that tragedy. It is at the top of the list of all those things that in my memory’s eye can never be obscured, any more than the days of glory when Duncan Edwards was so young and powerful and, like the team he inspired, was going to last forever.
Of course no one lasts forever, but if you are very lucky, as I have been, you have a certain duty to remember and cherish all the best of what you have felt and seen. I have tried to write it all down here, and I have to say it has never been a chore. But then how could it be? So much of what I have known and seen has been a feast that I know will nourish me to the last of my days.
Maybe one of the most unforgettable contributions to such a belief came on a rainy day in Manchester in late January 1994. It was the day we buried the Old Man – the day we looked into the eyes of the thousands who crowded the streets and saw in their glistening tears the meaning of the best of what could be achieved by the game in which we had made our lives.
The Old Man always told us that football is more than a game. It has the power to bring happiness to ordinary people. In the sadness and the rain, that belief was the glory of his life – and the unbreakable pride I felt at being part of it. He was Manchester United and, I will always like to think, so am I.
CLUB STATISTICS
Compiled by Jack Rollin
BOBBY CHARLTON
11 October 1937 Born Ashington, Northumberland
6 June 1953 Joined Manchester United groundstaff
4 October 1954 Turned professional
6 October 1956 League debut v Charlton Athletic (scoring twice)
May 1966 FWA Footballer of the Year
June 1966 European Footballer of the Year
1969 Awarded OBE
May 1973 Appointed manager Preston North End
1974 Awarded CBE; PFA Merit Award
May 1974 Player-manager of Preston North End
1975–76 Waterford United player (played 31, scored 18)
1982 Wigan Athletic director and caretaker manager
1984 Director of Manchester United
1994 Knighted
Bobby Charlton played in 759 first-class matches for Manchester United and 45 with Preston North End.
His United figures break down as follows: 606 League, 79 FA Cup, 24 League Cup, 45 European, 3 Charity Shield, 2 World Club Championship.
At Preston, it was 38 League, 4 FA Cup and 3 League Cup.
His goals at United were 199 League, 19 FA Cup, 7 League Cup, 22 European and 2 Charity Shield.
At Preston, it was 8 League, 1 FA Cup and 1 League Cup for a grand total of 259.
HONOURS WITH MANCHESTER UNITED
First Division champions: 1957, 1965, 1967
FA Cup winners: 1963
European Cup winners: 1968
FA Youth Cup winners: 1954, 1955, 1956
MANCHESTER UNITED
INDEX
Note: ‘BC’ denotes Bobby Charlton, ‘MU’ Manchester United. Page numbers in italics denote entries in the Statistics section, and consecutive page references in this section are concatenated. References to countries, cities, etc. are to teams unless otherwise indicated.
Aberdeen FC here
AC Milan here, here, here
Adolfo (Benfica player) here
Aldershot FC here, here
Allison, Malcolm here, here, here, here, here, here
Altrincham Junior League here
Amancio, Amaro Varela here, here
Anderlecht here, here, here, here
Anglo-Italian Cup here, here, here
Angus, John here, here, here
Argentina (country) here
Armstrong, Joe here, here, here
Arsenal FC here, here, here, here, here
Ashington AFC here, here
Aston, John here, here, here, here
Aston Villa
Charity Shield here
FA Cup here, here, here, here
league here, here, here
League Cup here
Athletic Bilbao here
Atkinson, Ron here, here
Augusto, Jose here
Bailey, Tommy (uncle of BC) here
Balderston, Andrea (née Charlton) here, here, here, here
Balderston, Emma here
Balderston, William here
Ball, Alan here, here
Ball, Nora here
Ball, Norma see Charlton, Norma
Ball, Tommy here
Banks, Gordon here
Banks, Ralph here
Banks, Tommy here, here, here
Barcelona here
Barnsley FC here
Bastin, Cliff here
Baxter, Jimmy here
Bayern Munich here, here
BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) here, here
Becerril, Jose (Minguela) here
Beckenbauer, Franz here
Beckham, David here, here, here, here, here, here
Beckham, Victoria here
Bedlington Grammar School here, here
Bell, Colin here
Benfica here, here, here, here, here, here
Benson, George here
Bent, Geoff here
Bentley, Roy here
Bernabeu, Santiago here
Berry, Johnny here, here, here, here, here
Best, Dickie here
Best, George here, here, here, here
in BC’s personal best MU team here, here
death here, here
debut here
drinking and indiscipline here, here, here, here, here
European Cup here, here, here 1967-68 here, here, here, here, here, here, here
European Cup Winners’ Cup here
FA Cup here
interest in domesticity here
league here, here, here, here, here, here
World Club Championship here, here
youth team here
Betancort, Antonio Rodrigo (Barrera) here
Bilardo, Carlos here
Bird, John here
Birmingham City
FA Cup here, here, here, here
league here, here, here, here
Bishop Auckland FC here, here
Blackburn Rovers here, here
Blackpool FC here, here, here, here, here, here
Blanchflower, Danny here, here
Blanchflower, Jackie here, here, here
Blatter, Sepp here, here
Bloomfield, Jimmy here, here
Blyth Spartans here
Bobby Charlton Soccer School here
Boca Juniors here
Bolton Wanderers here, here, here
Bond, John here
Borussia Dortmund here, here
Bournemouth FC here
Bradley, Warren here
Brennan, Shay here, here, here, here, here, here
My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography Page 33