My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography

by Bobby Charlton

  As I drove up to Scotland, we talked about the good and the bad times of the past, and the uncertainties of the future. He talked about the weight of pressure on the manager of Manchester United, the sense that you always had to be one step ahead, always moving forward.

  Naturally, I left most of the talking to him. He asked me my opinion about his possible successors, but the only name he himself mentioned was Dave Sexton, who had been doing some tremendous work with a young and talented Chelsea side. I said that Sexton seemed to be an extremely good football man, and a very strong and decent character, but really that was all I could say. I never saw myself as a kingmaker, certainly not then when I was still playing.

  It did occur to me that maybe he had something in mind for me. The mere fact that he had decided we should spend a few days together on our own provoked that thought, but I was certainly not inclined to make any claims for myself. I never had, and never would, have ambitions to manage Manchester United. However much I loved the club, and wanted it to do well, I just couldn’t see myself taking the reins. I hadn’t thought of the job, or still less trained myself for it, and the mood of the Old Man didn’t provide any new incentive. He made it clear that in some ways he had gone on under sufferance, out of a sense of duty – and also that no obvious successor had announced himself.

  It was good to spend some time with the great man who had been such a powerful influence in my life, who had set the standards that I had always tried to follow, but it was sad, too. I think he felt that as far as he was concerned the best of his contribution had come and now, most probably, gone. He lamented the fact that there was no obvious candidate to take on his mantle, leaving him to go, finally, with an easy heart, knowing that his work was in strong and safe hands.

  Looking back, it is some comfort that towards the end of his life he did have the clearest indication that the search he was embarking upon when I drove him to Scotland had almost certainly ended in success. As we were playing our golf and musing on the future, a very different football man was contemplating the end of his playing career, and concentrating his mind on the challenge of becoming a great manager. It would take more than a decade for the strength of the former Rangers centre forward Alex Ferguson to truly emerge, and for Manchester United those years would be uncertain and often difficult ones, but the great bonus was that, when he did eventually arrive at Old Trafford, the ambitions and dreams inspired by Matt Busby remained as intense as ever.

  For me, though, the drive home from Scotland, despite the restlessness and concerns of the Old Man, brought no change in my view of football: I trained, I played and I thanked God for an existence which had met all of my boyhood hopes. My basic ambition was the same as it had always been. I would wake up in the morning lifted by the knowledge that I still loved to play football more than anything else, and that I would be safe for as long as this was true.

  But then, I suppose, you can detach yourself from certain realities only for so long. I reckoned I had a few years left, give or take the size and the menace of the clouds that were now, as probably anyone could see, beginning to form over what I had seen as the unbreakable citadel of Old Trafford.

  It meant that I had a very simple option. I had to take the best of what was left – and live as well, and as uncomplainingly, as I could with the rest.

  22

  THE OLD MAN STEPS BACK

  ALTHOUGH I SHARED the growing concern about what would happen after the now inevitable abdication of the Old Man, the rest of my football life remained on a diet of hopefulness. The ebbing of belief that we were still a major force would be spread over a few years. It is one of the great aspects of football – hope is usually one of the last casualties.

  As I pushed into my thirties, I could congratulate myself that I was still playing the game for a living at the highest level. I couldn’t imagine doing anything that would be better or more satisfying, and certainly there was nothing that could be more enjoyable on a recurring, daily basis. Yes, I was moving into the wrong end of my career, but I still felt good when I did my work on the training field and went out to play.

  I was also still deeply involved with the now knighted Alf Ramsey’s England and many said we were stronger than in 1966, with players like Colin Bell, Francis Lee and Alan Mullery pushing hard for their places in the Mexican sun of the 1970 World Cup, when we would have good reason to believe in our chances of defending our title.

  At home, it was true that there was a feeling that the United team really had only one way to go unless it was dramatically refitted by Sir Matt Busby – who, on top of his other concerns, was still reluctant to plunge all the profits into the transfer market – but some days did see a flaring of hope. These were days when the fingers on the clock seem to flick back magically a year or so; when the old chemistry stirred.

  With the exception of a taut night in Brussels, when Anderlecht attacked our 3–0 first-leg lead (explosively created by a revived Denis Law) so strongly that we were happy to edge through on a 4–3 aggregate, in general we eased our way through to the semi-finals of the European Cup.

  In the league George Best, assisted mainly by new signing Willie Morgan from Burnley, helped us travel back to the peak of the mid-sixties in an 8–1 demolition of Queens Park Rangers – a performance that, despite the weakness of the London team, provided enough momentum for us to play our way out of a dawning threat of relegation. There was also a burst of promise in the fifth round of the FA Cup, when Birmingham were thrashed 6–2, but that particular tide turned against us soon enough when we met Everton in the next round.

  Of course there was still much quality in our team, but there was also considerable wear and tear. Nobby, for instance, was being betrayed by his knees, submitting to a serious operation and then endangering his recovery in his enthusiasm to be playing again. Perhaps, like the rest of his older team-mates, he had an anxiety to prove that he was as good and as strong as he ever was. John Aston, who had looked so indestructible in the European Cup final, broke a leg against Manchester City just at that point in his career when he had truly established himself as a significant player. He fought his way back, but he was never quite the same and soon he was being transferred to Luton Town. Brian Kidd suffered a scoring block and suffered his first injuries.

  However, when you looked at the personality and the confidence of the team, perhaps the most serious indication of a problem was the fact that as captain I was beginning to be asked by some of my team-mates: ‘What’s happening with George?’

  The truth was that George Best, though still just in his mid-twenties, was making less and less effort to conform to the basic requirements of a professional footballer; if he wasn’t absent from training, he was late, and though, when he did appear, his extraordinary physical resilience was as apparent as ever, the effect was inevitably distracting. He was beginning to operate on his own terms.

  However wonderfully he performed on Saturday afternoons, George was a member of a team and his sense of the responsibilities of that had slipped to a degree dangerous to both him and anyone who was trying to impose some basic levels of discipline at the club. That was still the Old Man’s job, but my position was, to say the least, delicate.

  I understood the frustrations of those players who argued that there should be only one set of rules, and that they should apply to everyone, whatever the level of their talent – but then I also tried to look at the situation through the eyes of the manager. George – helped by that extraordinary capacity to live his life on his own terms and yet so often brilliantly disguise the effects – could still ravage any opposition in his unique way. Even if you worried about his prospects in the longer term, for the moment it was still plain that we could not easily jettison such a talent.

  The problem with George was progressive throughout the reigns of three of the men who succeeded the Old Man – Wilf McGuinness, Frank O’Farrell and Tommy Docherty; all of them would face the dilemma of measuring genius against the need to install
discipline that covered everyone at the club.

  George would, down the months – and not least in the spring of 1970 when he was caught with a girl in a hotel room by Wilf on the day of our FA Cup semi-final replay with Leeds United – work himself into the core of United’s growing crisis. He was hard to live with, in some professional terms, but could we live without him?

  The question was increasingly to the forefront of our affairs – and it would become particularly so, for example, when you considered the height of the hurdle barring our way to a second straight appearance in the European Cup final. Success in the semi-final would have quite dramatically obscured the extent of our slippage as one of the strongest teams at home and abroad.

  We would have liked to take our chances against two of the other three survivors in the competition, Ajax of Amsterdam or Spartak Trnava, the champions of Czechoslovakia, but instead we drew the most formidable team: AC Milan, our conquerors in those desperate post-Munich days.

  Polished and prompted by Gianni Rivera, a star of the Italian national team, Milan played the classic Italian game, rock solid in defence and always looking for breaks. They did maximum damage on two of them, their second goal of the first leg coming from their Swedish inter national winger Kurt Hamrin, who was also involved in the dismissal of John Fitzpatrick, found guilty of kicking the Swede off the ball. Nor did it help when Nobby was forced to limp out of the match.

  By now, we knew that the Old Man was about to surrender the reins at Old Trafford. He had gathered us together one day after training to say that he felt it was time for him to step down from running the team, though he would not be walking away; he would still be involved with the club and still willing us on into new challenges. This was the most powerful of incentives. What better parting present could there be than another European Cup?

  At Old Trafford, we threw ourselves at Milan, but their defence – in which my old World Cup final opponent Karl Heinz Schnellinger had recovered some of the poise he had lost when trying to curb the amazing energy of Alan Ball at Wembley – were as defiant as they had been in San Siro. After the first game, the odds were always going to be severe, but at the very least we could run ourselves into the floor. Denis Law had a goal disallowed and with the Milan defence so strong and unforgiving the disappointment of that was compounded. However, after seventy minutes George Best once again demonstrated why the Old Man had decided to turn away from any zero tolerance policy with regard to his time-keeping at the training ground. George took on the Milan defence and won, before playing me in so that I could score from an acute angle.

  Naturally, we laid siege to the Milan goal but the catenaccio – the bolted door of Italian defence – had been slammed back into place. It was immovable in the face of all of George’s wiles, Denis’s lunges and my attempts to break it down. Afterwards, Sir Matt – like Alf, he too had been knighted in the wake of the outstanding moment in his career – shook our hands and thanked us for our efforts.

  Perhaps no football man on earth had learned to walk with such grace along the fine line between the greatest of success and disappointment – and if this, as he then believed, was his last competitive match in charge of the team who had become the centre of his life, at least he had the satisfaction of seeing a fighting effort. If, undoubtedly, we were not the team that had run so hard and played so well in the Bernabeu a year earlier, it was clear that he realised we had fought that reality as best we could.

  What no one, including the Old Man, could know, was that what had happened against Milan represented a pivotal moment in our history. Manchester United finally stepped down, for the best part of the next two decades, from that status that had first been achieved in the years after the war when they became the team that carried a special aura whenever they walked on to the field.

  Of course there had been the lean time after Munich, but that was an inevitable interlude created by the most tragic of circumstances, and the truth was that if the accident was devastating, it also added to the mystique of the club. The drama of United had moved on to another level where resurrection, rather than the mere gathering of trophies, became a great and compelling goal, but now, at the end of the sixties, there was another kind of problem. It was the need to reignite the club and also set new targets and standards.

  The problem was that Sir Matt Busby had made it clear that resurgence was a burden he could no longer carry, although it was one that was being accepted by hungrier, and maybe less wounded managers like Bill Shankly (for a few years more) and his successors at Liverpool, by Brian Clough at Derby County and by Malcolm Allison a few miles across town at Manchester City.

  The Busby legacy was a huge pressure on the managers and players who followed. Eventually of course, men brimming with talent and confidence would arrive in the shape of Bryan Robson, Roy Keane and, in his unique and somewhat eccentric way, Eric Cantona. Most thrilling of all, there would be those heirs to the original Busby Babes: Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes, David Beckham and Nicky Butt and the Neville boys. But before that there would be the desert, one made all the more barren by the raids on the peak of Europe by Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, and then by a team who had lived in our shadows for so long, Aston Villa.

  One of the problems, I believed, was that we started to buy inferior players. We went into the market, I sometimes thought, almost for the sake of it without any real guarantees that we were improving our squad.

  Down the years a series of managers failed to make the breakthrough and the extent of the problems they faced is surely illustrated by the quality of the credentials they brought to the job: O’Farrell, Docherty, Dave Sexton and Ron Atkinson all arrived at Old Trafford with big reputations and solid bodies of work behind them, but none of them could achieve anything like United’s former glory.

  First, though, there was the ordeal of my friend Wilf McGuinness. As a player, Wilf had suffered the most terrible disappointment, but in some ways it seemed that this was mere preparation for the trial which came to him when the Old Man told him that he was going to take a back seat and was putting him in charge of the day-to-day running of the team.

  Wilf lived for United, he had fought his injury with exceptional and moving courage, but he failed to succeed in a challenge he plainly felt carried awesome responsibility. Maybe that in itself was part of the reason, maybe it was because he did find it precisely that – awesome.

  There was also the fact that whoever it was who arrived to take up Busby’s mantle would have faced massive pressure. Taking over from the Old Man wasn’t just a question of producing a series of good results. It was also about style – that famous aura that was now so frequently being called into question whenever we struggled on the field. There were indeed some tough days out on the pitch. Sometimes, as a midfielder, I felt that I was permanently defending rather than attacking. I did a lot of running, but rarely did it seem to be in the right direction.

  The appointment of Wilf turned out to be a trauma for him that stretched out eighteen months before he was relieved of his duties at the tail end of 1970. Famously, tragically, the shock of being told that his leadership of the club to which he had devoted so much was over, caused him to lose all of his hair. It was painful to see Wilf go down because here was one of the great enthusiasts. He had been a great friend to me when we were lads, and played in the England Schoolboys team, and he had made me part of his family life.

  There were stories that Wilf changed when he got the job, that he tried too hard to separate himself from players he had been so close to before his elevation, but I didn’t see it that way. He knew he had to alter his relationships with the players; we knew that too; but if that was straightforward enough when you thought about it, it was not so easy in practice. I could only sympathise with the difficulties he faced in his new role – and wonder, given his background in the training set-up, whether he had been placed in an impossible situation.

  Wilf had to make some authority for himself, and it would be unfair on hi
m now to forget the huge problems he faced. No longer could he come into the dressing room with his jaunty banter and maybe a new joke; he had to develop, instantly, a certain distance – and making distance between him and people he knew and liked and admired for their football ability could never come easily to him. Certainly I reject some suggestions that he was particularly hard on me. It didn’t fill me with joy that one of his first moves was to drop me, but leaving me out of the team was, I reckoned, maybe one of his rites of passage as the new boss of the dressing room. There was one story that he had me doing press-ups in front of the other players and that it was an act designed to humiliate me. Nonsense. That wasn’t Wilf’s nature at all. I once did have to do press-ups in the dressing room, that’s true, but only as a routine punishment that any of us were subjected to if we were late. Sure, I faced the good-natured taunts of my team-mates – but I was only on the receiving end of something that I had been happy to dish out in the past. There was no problem at all. It was good banter.

  Later, he did say that, maybe when he was appointed, he should have fought the Old Man harder for more influence in such a vital matter as transfer dealing, the key to any club’s future. It seemed that he pushed for the signing of three players who he believed would have the quality to provide the club with a new core of strength and ambition – Colin Todd, the young defensive star of Sunderland who were sliding back to the Second Division, Mick Mills, the tough and skilled full back of Ipswich, and Malcolm Macdonald, who had become something of a scoring sensation with Luton Town. For one reason or another, however, Wilf received the thumbs down on each proposal. It meant that he had to try to lift the team, and meet expectations which anyone would have found oppressive, without the power to truly shape his own destiny.