My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography

by Bobby Charlton

  Events at Highbury had underpinned once again our belief in our prospects, and certainly almost everything that happened in the first half in the big, cold concrete stadium of Red Star served to deepen the confident frame of mind we now seemed to be carrying from match to match as permanent baggage. We played with a freedom that could only be described as sensational.

  In our work-out on the day before the game we had been relaxed and that mood had been maintained on the drive to the stadium on match day. The banter was ceaseless – and inevitably led by Eddie Colman. He talked about the latest Sinatra song. Albert Scanlon discussed Marilyn Monroe’s latest film. Through the windows of the bus there were so many new things to see: great banners of Tito on the big grey buildings, a unit of tanks clanking over the cobbles, smoke rising from the street stalls where they sold food and roasted nuts, and women in heavy boots working on the road. There was plenty of material for social observers – and the comedians – on the bus.

  I was still the young boy among the young men, but my self-belief was growing with each game and I no longer feared so much the kind of rebuke that had once been delivered to me by Allenby Chilton when I spoke out of turn. I had scored a few goals so maybe I could make the odd contribution to the talk.

  In the dressing room before we went out Matt Busby was as composed as ever in his big dark overcoat and smartly snapped trilby. ‘There are no terrors out there for you boys now,’ he said. ‘You know this team: they are good but not good enough to beat you. We’ve beaten them once. Now let’s do it again. Enjoy the game, express yourselves. Don’t forget your own strengths, always play to them. You should know that you have nothing to fear.’

  We started as we had at Highbury, Dennis Viollet scoring after two minutes, with me adding two more in the thirtieth and thirty-second minutes. It was a cold day and there was a light covering of snow. There was frost on the pitch, but not so much that the surface wouldn’t take a stud. You could run and you could pass and shoot, and we did enough of all three to subdue the big crowd in their long coats and their woollen hats. Duncan retained the dominant mood he had displayed at Highbury, and for most of the half we seemed to be quicker to the ball and to have plenty of time to play it.

  Red Star had fought hard and showed a lot of skill in the first leg at Old Trafford, and our long journey to Belgrade had not been without a touch of apprehension. They had a little midfielder, Dragoslav Sekularac, who was so good, so clever in Manchester, that I found myself asking, ‘Why haven’t I heard of this fellow before?’

  They also had a player, Kostic, who showed us for the first time how it was possible to bend a free kick round a defensive wall. He did it brilliantly after Harry Gregg was caught handling the ball outside his area – and this was after the Yugoslavs had already pulled back two goals. The first of them seemed to be no more than a small alarm call at the time. With the goal advantage from Old Trafford, we were still three goals clear, and in the first half we had simply torn them apart. But Red Star came alive with their strike and when Kostic brought the score on the day to 3–3 with four minutes to go we were under hard pressure. It was another glimpse of the depth of European football and its capacity to spring an ambush the moment you took anything for granted.

  Sekularac was a classic example of somebody who, despite being completely unheralded when he first arrived in England, had skills and subtleties which gave a whole new dimension to the game. In my international career I would collide with him again on several occasions, and each time I marvelled at his ability to shape a game with both his skill and speed of thought. Over the years I would get to know him quite well. He was a proud gypsy and told me about his background. Certainly it was not difficult to imagine him performing intricate dance steps beside a camp fire. In 1970, when I was preparing for the World Cup in Mexico, I met him in a little town in the Andes. I said how strange it was to find him in such a remote place, but he explained that there was good money to earn in Colombia if you were able to teach the game. He was surrounded by youngsters who seemed to hang on his every word and gesture.

  In Belgrade he had a few lessons for a Manchester United whose belief they could win the European Cup was still on the rise. However, we were quick and confident students and just as we did at Highbury, we avoided the worst consequences of relaxing, however subliminally. The Serbs invaded our goal but Harry Gregg put behind him his earlier mishap, as did Bill Foulkes who had conceded a penalty, and we held firm under the pressure.

  The Old Man told us we had passed another test on our way to the semi-final with, as it turned out, the powerful Italian club AC Milan, and this, with local beer and a drop of slivovic, was more than enough fuel for a night of celebration in a club which featured the usual array of East European cabaret acts, including jugglers and dancers, and later on at the home of a British embassy official. It was all part of the great adventure that stretched before us so dazzlingly. The toast, as it always was then, was to the future.

  There were a few thick heads in the morning, but no serious casualties. In those days it was not frowned upon if a player took a drink, even if it was more than one or two, and smoking was quite commonplace. It seems bizarre now, but a player was put in charge of himself in such matters, and it was quite a few years later before a combination of my wife and my daughters persuaded me that smoking was not a good idea.

  Back then there was a strong feeling that if you did your training, and performed well on the field, you were entitled to live a relatively normal life. There were certain rules of course. If you represented a club like Manchester United you had responsibilities that could never be put down. It was unthinkable to go drinking before a game. If you did that you were letting down your club and your team-mates and, not least, yourself. However, a few drinks and some music were your due after a good performance. If you strived hard enough to win, you were free to celebrate, within reason of course and with prearranged time limits. So there was little remorse among those who had had a drink or two before setting off to Belgrade airport; only the exhilaration that came with the conviction that once again we had put ourselves in a position to claim the greatest prize in Europe.

  You looked around the bus and saw one strength piled upon another. If we didn’t have di Stefano or Gento, we had virtuosos of our own: Duncan was touching new levels of authority, Dennis Viollet was playing with tremendous bite and was just irrepressible around the box, and Eddie Colman was producing a little more swagger and a little more confidence with every game. Harry Gregg had brought a lot to the team with his fierce protection of the goal and his fighting spirit.

  On top of all this was the extraordinary leadership of Roger Byrne. I was never close to the captain, not as I was with almost every other member of the team, but he always had my immense respect. I saw him as an aloof master in all that he did. I didn’t have the nerve to speak to him freely because he seemed to be operating on another level of life to the rest of us. He seemed so well educated, so cosmopolitan in my eyes, and I marvelled at the fact that he spent most of his free time away from the club working in a hospital, where he was training to be a physiotherapist. I was told that when patients and staff talked to him about football, he was reluctant to get involved. He said that football was just part of his life, and when he was at the hospital he expected to be treated like everybody else. For a lad like me, who had viewed education as a necessity to be suffered before the real business of playing football, it seemed almost unbelievable that someone just a few years older could do so much with his life and make so little fuss along the way.

  He didn’t hang around with the lads because he had his own life in Manchester, and was married and not in need of boyish company. It was no surprise to learn that one of his best friends was Brian Statham, the great Lancashire and England fast bowler – no more than it was that he was an accomplished cricketer and rugby player. Indeed, I thought it was typical of him when I heard that when Statham was selected before him for the National Service RAF football te
am, he made no complaint, no angry protests about his status in the game with Manchester United, preferring instead to immediately offer his services to the rugby coach. He promptly became the team’s star performer. That seemed to be the essence of Roger Byrne: natural confidence and a fierce independence.

  On the field Roger would shout his instructions firmly enough, let you know who was in charge of affairs, but generally he was quiet off the field. He had the aura of a true captain. If you did well, scored a good goal, say, you would not expect more than a cursory pat on the back, yet from him it was a gesture you would prize very highly indeed.

  Those who saw him as an untouchable force at Old Trafford included the Old Man. After Byrne’s first game for United, when he had joined such giants as Jack Rowley, Johnny Carey and Charlie Mitten, Busby had declared, ‘It is hard to imagine a young player could make a more mature debut. Within a few matches, I think you will see this boy make his case to play for England, and when he gets in the team I think it will be impossible to get him out.’ I was told that Busby had once angered him by leaving him out of the team after a bad defeat. Roger had the feeling that he had been made a scapegoat and his frustration welled up during a training session, when Busby shouted an instruction. Byrne’s response was dismissive and his language was quite rough, and the manager retired to his office with something of a dilemma. Could he accept this challenge to his authority – or did he have to impose some discipline? His decision, before it was quickly revoked, was sensational. He put Roger on the transfer list. But not for long, when he pondered how much the team would miss his style and leadership, which had already made him a fixture in the England team, and how much interest was beating against his door.

  Busby had that famous saying, ‘That’s not United,’ when a player’s behaviour was deemed to have fallen below expected standards, and this no doubt was such an occasion – but for Byrne a compromise could be made. Busby knew that he had a rare leader who would be a vital factor in any conquest of Europe.

  One key to a successful team is a balance of respect, an understanding of the strength of individual players but also the wider sense of dependency on each other. The captain had no separate lists in the matter of criticism if there were mistakes on the field. Whoever you were, you could be exposed to the force of his leadership. It didn’t matter if Duncan Edwards did something amazing if other members of the team let themselves down. Nor was Duncan shielded from criticism when he had Roger Byrne’s critical eye on him. Sometimes even the big man felt a shaft of the captain’s displeasure.

  There were no challenges to the captain’s rule. He led by example game in, game out. He was never flustered, never panicky. He had that little bit more experience than the rest of us. He was the founder member of the Busby Babes, the second oldest member of the team, and though he was still two days short of his twenty-ninth birthday when he led us on to the plane in Belgrade, he had the bearing of a general who knew that he had just led his young army to yet another striking achievement.

  It was only later that I would learn that Roger Byrne was subject to terrible superstition and some dark fears. Behind the front of confidence there were, it turned out, some of the doubts that we all shared in the small hours of the night in some distant hotel room. Once, his roommate John Doherty reported, Byrne woke up at 3 a.m. to report that he had had a terrible dream. He never told John the detail of the nightmare, merely conveying the sense of an awful premonition. It was a haunting episode for Doherty because it happened on the eve of a routine cup tie against Bristol Rovers, and, in a season which saw United take the title by eleven points, the cup performance was a disaster. United lost 4–0. No one could remember such an incoherent performance from the team that down the years had become known as the Red Devils.

  According to John, there was another strange incident later in that 1955–56 season. Again Byrne woke up in the small hours complaining of a nightmare. This time he had dreamed of missing a penalty in a vital game, and he declared that if a penalty was awarded in the coming game with Blackpool – one that could settle the title – there was no way he would take it. Predictably in the circumstances, United were given a penalty and Roger asked Johnny Berry to take the kick, but Johnny said, ‘I don’t mind – you take it.’ Byrne’s face clouded over, he yelled, ‘You take the penalty,’ and then he turned his back. To everyone’s great relief, Berry scored, and Byrne promptly reverted to a mask of absolute authority.

  Something else not widely known about our captain that February morning in Belgrade was that in the two previous Februarys he had had life-threatening experiences.

  In 1956 he had driven his car into a lamp-post and broken his collarbone. In the following year, he had crashed near the Busby home in the Manchester suburb of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, and the Old Man had rushed the short distance to the scene of the accident. He was immensely relieved to see that on this occasion Roger had escaped serious injury. This did not stop him delivering a fierce lecture on the need for safe driving. At the time the captain was the only member of the team who owned a car, and Bill Foulkes later reported that on one occasion he and Ray Wood had been passengers on a white-knuckle ride with Byrne at the wheel. Wood swore that he would never travel with the captain again.

  Any superstitious dread was hidden when Roger Byrne strode on to the chartered British European Airways Elizabethan – call sign G-ALZU AS 57 – at Marshal Tito airport on the morning of 6 February 1958. His face was impassive and, like all of us who marched up the steps, two by two, he was extremely sure of himself and, of course, indestructible.

  11

  MUNICH

  IT WAS A wonderful state of mind we took on to the plane and in its last few hours of life it had maybe never been more intense. In the cabin there was a buzz of conversation and bursts of laughter and the card players were aggressively at work. We were heading home for yet another red carpet welcome, another return of conquering heroes.

  I spent much of the flight to Munich, where we would put down for refuelling, discussing with Dennis Viollet how it was that we had so suddenly fallen away from our complete mastery of Red Star in the first half. It was true that we had come through the crisis well, but it was one we should really have avoided. We had been forced to survive in a match we had seemed at one point to control completely. Maybe, we speculated, it had something to do with the after-effects of the Highbury thriller, which had received rapturous press accounts. Perhaps also there was a little concern that we had to hold back something for Saturday’s challenge against Stan Cullis’s league-leading Wolves. This match, certainly, was clearly on the mind of the Old Man, who, having been denied an historic Double of league title and FA Cup the previous spring, had set his heart on three straight titles to match the achievement of Herbert Chapman’s Arsenal back in the thirties. If we were to stay in the race, we had to take two points off Wolves; we had to show that what happened against Arsenal, and against Red Star in the first half, was part of an established pattern and not some flash of fleeting brilliance.

  Ushering us through the airport in Belgrade, Busby had no doubt been concerned by the need for a prompt departure and swift completion of our trip. The requirement to rush home to Manchester through the snow-filled skies of Europe had been spelled out by the Football League, which had been so emphatic in its refusal to give a blessing to our Continental mission. Under new league regulations, any team competing in Europe had to be back in England a full twenty-four hours before they were due to play a championship game. League secretary Hardaker no doubt argued that he was protecting the ‘integrity’ of the Football League, preventing important matches being squeezed into the programme in the shadow of European action. Another interpretation was that he was making it as difficult as possible for the man who had defied him with his insistence that United would fight on this new frontier of football.

  The Old Man had placed an extra burden on his team, and himself, but Dennis and I agreed that if any type of football team was equipped to take
on the challenge of a long domestic season and the new demands of European competition it was surely one bred in England. Though we had so much work to do at home, there were good reasons to believe that we could cope with the physical pressure of another European semi-final and the possibility of an appearance in the final on top of commitments in the league and FA Cup. Certainly it had not been any crisis of stamina that had caused our downfall against Real Madrid the previous season. Indeed, the Old Trafford crowd, and some of us in the dressing room, had decided that if the second leg had stretched on for a few more minutes there would have been a very good chance of us getting the goals which would have earned a replay and ultimately a final against Fiorentina, a team we would have strongly fancied ourselves to beat.

  Pushing ourselves to our physical limit, Dennis and I agreed, was simply part of the job. It was something which we trained for intensively in the pre-season, and which was built into us by the work we had to do on often heavy pitches and under the demands of crowds who never made any secret of the fact that as long as we were on the field we were obliged to give maximum effort.

  Many years later the great Dutch player Johan Cruyff would say that in club football the English player was always hugely respected for his willingness – and ability – to fight until the last kick of the game. He said that the great fear of even the top European teams, heavy with skill and tactical nous, was that an English team would never know when it was time to quit.