However, this was only after I had noted that in football more than most places it is a tide which can suddenly change direction. Back in the autumn, for example, it was hard not to view prospects rather more pessimistically. There had been a dip in the team’s performance that had brought the worry that the tumultuous events of the previous season might be bringing a reaction. I was also growing a little restive that Billy Whelan and Dennis Viollet had reclaimed their places. Increasing the frustration was the fact that neither in their form nor their fitness were Billy or Dennis offering much hope that I could quickly reclaim some of the attention that had come to me in such a flood the previous spring.
By the start of February 1958, however, the last of the doubts were over – both, it seemed, for me and the team. In the game against Arsenal we were marching again and with the sharpest touch of my career I was able to play a significant part.
We had returned to the basis of all previous success. It is an aspect of football that it is very easy to forget what first made you a force. It is supposed to be a simple game, but lost sometimes is the amount of work and thought necessary to make it so. You win a few games and you assume that winning is a right as much as an achievement. You stop doing the things that made you great – and this is when a great teacher and enforcer like Jimmy Murphy plays his most important role. If he does it well, he becomes part of your conscience.
For me it was a return to the truth that I had discovered just a few weeks after my debut against Charlton the season before, and was then underlined by Tommy Taylor and David Pegg before the semi-final with Birmingham City.
Lesson one had came against the Wolves team which Stan Cullis had built on such solid foundations. In fact at that point, back in November 1956, they were in some ways superior to us, despite Matt Busby’s accumulation of outstanding talent. They had worked relentlessly and they were in every sense a team. In that first season with the seniors, I was told constantly how difficult it was going to be, moving up to First Division football. You couldn’t afford to make a single mistake in the process of nullifying everything the opposition were bound to throw in your direction. Against a poor Charlton Athletic that message was hardly borne out; against Wolves it was underlined by every minute of the game at Old Trafford – my third in the top flight.
Though Peter Broadbent, an inside forward I admired so much for his craft and his eye for dangerous situations, was missing, Wolves were still formidably strong with England men like Billy Wright, Ron Flowers, Bill Slater, Dennis Wilshaw and Jimmy Mullen. Before the game the consensus was that we would be happy to win by the odd goal. In fact we won 3–0, and long before the end of a match I had expected to be the hardest I had ever played, I was telling myself, ‘Well, Jimmy Murphy was right to say if you work hard enough, if you make stopping the other team playing a vital part of your game, you’re halfway to victory.’ It was a fundamental lesson against a team who had been growing stronger as the season progressed and came to us on a run of six unbeaten matches.
The basic point, I realised, was that everyone who played football for a living had a duty to involve himself in all aspects of a team effort. Winning wasn’t guaranteed, I noted against Wolves, even as Billy Whelan and David Pegg scored early, and Tommy Taylor completed a win which, in the end, was so comfortable that Billy Wright, the England captain, was said to have been rendered speechless. Planning was required and worked. If you knew exactly what you were doing, and who on the opposite side was your particular responsibility, the challenge was quite straightforward. If you ignored the demands made on you by someone like Jimmy, your team would lose – and there would be nowhere to hide.
I had looked across the field, picking out all the big-name players in the famous old-gold shirts and black shorts and had said to myself, ‘Some people think this is really the best team in England but we’re beating them 3–0. It’s really true. The best team doesn’t always win.’
Fifteen months later, against Arsenal, football was easy again. It was both a rush of some of our best form and a celebration of the fact that we had grown strong on what had proved a surprisingly tricky road.
Even before the 1957–58 season’s first kick off – a com fortable 3–0 victory over newly promoted Leicester City, which saw Billy Whelan score a fine hat-trick that helped shut the door on any hopes I had of a swift return to glory – there had been a couple of unsettling developments. Both of them flowed directly from the splash we had made in the European Cup.
Internazionale of Milan, having seen the impact of John Charles, the great Welsh international, after his transfer from Leeds United to Juventus, began to court Tommy Taylor, much to the fury of Matt Busby. Then the Italian Football Federation, noting the way Busby had developed his team at Old Trafford, went to the top of the United tree and invited him to become their national coach. The Old Man declared, as he had the previous year when Real Madrid came courting, that he wasn’t going anywhere, and nor was Tommy, however much money the Italians put on the table.
Having dismissed such distractions, United went charging into the new season, thrusting their way into the leadership of the First Division for a third straight year. However, momentum flagged in September and we began to lose, three times in four games while slipping to fourth place. Busby was concerned that Ray Wood may have lost some of his nerve after his nightmare at Wembley, and Tommy Taylor, perhaps unsettled by the Italian interest and the fact that he was the latest English player to discover he had no control over his own destiny, was finding goals more elusive than usual. Busby was never prone to panic, but nor was he a manager inclined to sit on his hands in the face of signs that his team were in danger of drifting away from their best standards.
By December we had a new goalkeeper, Harry Gregg, bought at the record price of £25,000 from Doncaster Rovers, and a new forward who was being invited to make himself a permanent part of the team. That was me – and by way of celebration I began scoring almost as a matter of course. Everything that came my way on the field, I went for. I was no longer afraid of shooting at distance. Every time I did I believed I would score a goal, and often I was right to have such confidence.
I had heard about the Taylor situation only at second hand. Tommy, a shrewd Yorkshireman, kept the matter to himself in the dressing room, and in this he may have been recognising the fact that most young United players – and perhaps along with Wilf McGuinness I was a classic case – would no more think of leaving Old Trafford than join the Soviet astronaut programme. At the financial convenience of English clubs, there would over those years be a trickle of players going to Italy – led by John Charles and followed by players like Gerry Hitchens, Jimmy Greaves and my future team-mate Denis Law – but for most of us the idea was unthinkable.
In nearly twenty years as a professional with Manchester United, I wasn’t notified of a single approach. Inevitably, there would be the odd rumour and a whisper in my ear, but there wasn’t anything even vaguely official. I heard that Glasgow Rangers had made an enquiry about the possibility of signing me, and I was told later that there had indeed been something in it, but I didn’t attribute any deviousness to Matt Busby’s failure to notify me. I’m sure he just assumed I wouldn’t be interested. And of course he was right.
A few years later I had reason to believe that Real Madrid might try to persuade United to let me go. Santiago Bernabeu, the president, was always very friendly whenever I saw him and he sent a present when Norma and I were married in 1961. Given the aura of Real, and all they meant to me as representatives of beautiful football, it was extremely flattering, but Busby knew better than anyone that my vows to United were, in the context of football, as strong as the ones I had made to my wife.
The following year I was involved in the one ‘tappingup’ incident of my career. It happened when I went with England to Chile for the 1962 World Cup: a Chilean goalkeeper, who had connections in Argentina, told me that Boca Juniors were anxious to sign me – and make me a very rich man. I said that i
t was quite out of the question. When he asked me why this was so, I told him that one very good reason was that Norma was pregnant, and I wouldn’t want her to have any upheaval at such a time. He tried to brush away my objections. Finally, he said the difficulty of the pregnancy was a problem that could easily be solved. Boca Juniors were an important club and they would have no trouble arranging for Norma to have the baby in the British embassy in Buenos Aires. However, at no stage would such talk ever be more than a fantasy.
This was never more so than when 1957 turned into 1958. At last the club had given me reason to believe that I could bring to an end the phase when I was just the boy who could fill in for established stars like Viollet and Whelan and, looking back, I see that I produced exactly the right response. I scored in three of the four games against Leicester City, Luton Town on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, and Manchester City, but this was no more than a relatively gentle prelude to a break-out against the formid able Bolton Wanderers defence of Tommy Banks, Roy Hartle and John Higgins in mid-January. I scored a hat-trick and had never felt so confident on the ball, a mood I took into the fourth round FA Cup tie with Alf Ramsey’s Ipswich Town the following week, scoring both the goals at Old Trafford. One of them was of the spectacular variety with which I was being increasingly linked.
Going into the Highbury game the following week, Busby had a choice between a fully fit Whelan and me, and when he announced the team he was also saying that I had achieved another rite of passage. Nine goals in ten games had earned me the Busby nod in my own right.
As the game unfolded, Arsenal simply couldn’t cope with the level of our confidence or our touch. Duncan scored after ten minutes, from twenty-five yards. He bounded across the muddy surface before giving the fine Welsh international goalkeeper Jack Kelsey no chance. As was so often the reaction of opponents when Edwards exerted himself so powerfully in the early going, you could see Arsenal heads drop and this was a particular encouragement to our left winger Albert Scanlon.
Albert was a quirky character, brilliant one day, indifferent the next, but this was one of the performances of his life. Invariably he would concern his marker with his pace, but it could be said that his last ball wasn’t always his best. However, this day he touched perfection. I could only feel sympathy for my namesake, Arsenal’s right back Stan Charlton. The defender was tortured by Albert’s speed and trickery. It was as though the boy from Salford, who spent so many hours watching the latest Hollywood offerings in the city-centre cinemas, had woken up with the conviction that this day he would be in a film of his own. It was classical wing play: quick, functional, and totally committed to the final act of supplying a deadly cross. After thirty-four minutes he laid on the second goal, passing the ball to me after a seventy-yard run down the wing. ‘It’s easy, Bobby, lad,’ he said when I gave him a hug. Then Tommy Taylor scored our third just before half time.
Fifteen minutes into the second half David Herd, who would join United a few years later, smashed a shot past Harry Gregg, and in a few more minutes Jimmy Bloomfield scored twice. Cheers rolled down from the stand as we contemplated the bleak possibility that our run back into the title race – we had reached third place and were just six points behind Wolves, who were due to arrive at Old Trafford the following Saturday – was suddenly in danger of being halted.
It was an excellent test of our nerve. After the game we would be flying to Belgrade for the second leg of our European tie with Red Star of Belgrade. We had heard stories of how ferocious the Serbs were on their own soil, and we had had a taste of their force and skill at Old Trafford, when we’d had to battle to our limits to gain a 2–1 advantage, one of our goals coming from a Scanlon cross which I was able to hook home. Everyone said, from Busby down, that we would have to redouble our efforts if we were to survive. Now, here at Highbury, we were having something of a dress rehearsal. Duncan, as always, took Arsenal’s recovery as a personal affront, and from Roger Byrne there was the usual cool leadership. He wasn’t a shouter but he had a great presence. It was clear that we faced the kind of examination that we couldn’t afford to fail; it might just shape the rest of our season.
Dennis Viollet pushed us back in front from another cross by Scanlon in the sixty-fifth minute, four minutes after Bloomfield’s equalising strike, and then, after another seven minutes, Taylor scored his second goal from an angle which Kelsey must have thought impossible. The 5–3 lead seemed like an invitation to cruise home. Arsenal, and their ecstatic fans, had been swiftly subdued. At least it was a pleasant idea for the five minutes it took for the Welsh international inside forward Derek Tapscott to pull his team back into the game.
Nine goals might point a finger towards poor defence, but the quality of play was sustained, and was as thrilling to be involved in as it apparently was to see. We beat back waves of Arsenal attack to keep our lead, and at the final whistle the London fans perfectly reflected those days when a majority of supporters went to the game in the spirit Jack and I had always taken with us on our pilgrimages to Newcastle and Sunderland. They did not march off sourly to the buses and the underground trains. They had come to Highbury, it was plain to see and hear, with two purposes. One was to see Arsenal win. The other was to see good football, something demonstrated no less brilliantly by such as Duncan Edwards, Roger Byrne and Albert Scanlon because they happened to be wearing the colours of another team. They stayed and they cheered.
Recently I read an old account of the game which brought back so many warm memories. The Times, no less, reporting under the by-line of ‘our football correspondent’ in those days when Geoffrey Green was still the anonymous bard of football, could not have been more extravagant in its praise. ‘The thermometer was doing a war-dance. There was no breath left in anyone. The players came off arm in arm. They knew they had finally fashioned something of which to be proud.’ Then there was the recollection of the Arsenal full back Dennis Evans. He recalled, ‘Everyone was cheering. Not because of Arsenal, not because of United, but because of the game itself. No one left until five minutes after the game. They just stood cheering.’
It was something, I suppose, that players of later generations, for all the increase in their financial rewards and their celebrity, would never quite enjoy, not in that force, not in that sense that they had been part of something which went beyond themselves – and beyond the detail of which team happened to win or lose. Football won that day, hands down.
We could only hope for a similar outcome in Belgrade, though it would hardly be true to say that we were on a mission as ambassadors for the great game. We might pride ourselves on the quality of our play, and we might have won more admiration than ever before with the performance at Highbury, but the game against Red Star, we knew well enough, was unlikely to be about the beautiful game. We were going to win – or at least preserve our advantage from the first leg – and however pretty or dramatic the match, anything less would have to be recognised as a terrible setback.
The truth was that our fascination with the new world of European football had hardened into an extremely strong conviction. It made us itch for another go at the masters from Madrid; we believed we had served our apprenticeship in the game’s wider world. The Highbury salute had been wonderful, but it didn’t deflect us from an ambition that had so quickly come to outweigh all others. We had grown into the belief that we could win the European Cup. Why not? Maybe we weren’t ready for the likes of di Stefano and Kopa and Gento that first year, but we were more serious customers now. We were fresh from a 3–1 aggregate dismissal of Dukla Prague, champions of the most sophisticated of football nations, who had been led by a brilliant Josef Masopust soon to lead Czechoslovakia to the championship of Europe. If some corners of Europe, including our latest destination, Yugoslavia, were still a mystery, we had plenty of reasons now to think we could resolve any problem with some confidence.
Part of the thrill of Europe was that suddenly all its rewards seemed to be within our reach. There was also the sense that w
e were no longer merely representing the city of Manchester. Attempting to win the European title now meant that you carried the hopes of the whole nation, and there was something of that, we felt, in the great send-off we experienced at Highbury. It was the perfect launching pad for Belgrade, the confirmation that we were indeed England’s team of destiny. The plane would fly us to the Balkans, with a stop in Munich, and somewhere along the route it seemed entirely possible we might touch the stars.
10
BELGRADE
ON THE SATURDAY morning of the Arsenal game there had been a kerfuffle in our London hotel when it was discovered that George Whittaker, one of the club directors, had died in his room during the night. There was a confab of club officials and hotel staff in the lobby. A doctor arrived with his medical bag and an ambulance stood in the street.
Directors always travelled with us, and occasionally we would exchange a few words, but there was no real contact. Generally they came from a different stratum of life and there would be very little conversation beyond those few pleasantries. Directors were men of the world and important business. They dined separately and, we presumed, talked about their professional affairs and investments, and maybe a little bit about football. We, of course, talked mostly football but also music and girls and films and what we might do after the game. Really, we inhabited separate worlds from the likes of Mr Whittaker, and it was only Matt Busby who travelled between them. Still it was sad, we all agreed, that a man should go like that, on the road, away from his home and his loved ones.
However, for the Busby Babes there was not much that could dent our optimistic view of life. It was a known fact that when you got older there was a much greater risk of dying suddenly, but the young were proofed against such a thing; they could go about their business confident that when the sun rose in the morning all their ambitions and their hopes would still be alive. The young were immortal. If you had a degree of ambition and talent and a little courage there was nothing you couldn’t do. Already, for us, it was a belief that had been encouraged by great tides of cheers. At Old Trafford, with the rise of the youth team and the march of so many brilliant young players, it had become nothing less than an article of faith.
My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography Page 12
