Geoffrey Green added a tribute that was typically poetic, but I liked to think that it did express something of what I had tried to do. He wrote in The Times, ‘Bobby Charlton always possessed an elemental quality, jinking, changing feet and direction, turning gracefully on to the ball or accelerating through a gap surrendered by a confused enemy.’ It was a generous assessment of my work, and perhaps something that I could keep in my heart, to guard against some of the uncertainties of the future.
On that last of my trips with United – for an Anglo-Italian Cup game – we stayed on the shore of beautiful Lake Garda. The accompanying press were most concerned with the shape of Tommy Docherty’s new United, and it was a little strange to read about a future in which I no longer belonged. One story suggested that the manager would follow up his signing of Lou Macari, the forward star of Celtic, with a move for Asa Hartford, another Scot who was drawing a lot of attention as the midfield driving force of West Bromwich. The signing never happened, but the speculation was reasonable. United did, after all, have a vacancy.
As I thought of all the travels of the past, and how all the roads had finally brought me to this beautiful old part of the world, inevitably Nobby Stiles came to mind. I remembered an earlier trip to Italy. We were staying in Florence, killing some time in the hotel lobby, when I said to Nobby, ‘Come on, let’s take a little walk.’ I was looking in a shop window in a little square when I realised that Nobby was no longer with me. I saw a china shop and almost immediately heard a crash. Nobby came running out, straight past me. A few seconds later the owner emerged. When he saw me he said, ‘Mr Charlton, will you please tell Mr Stiles that he didn’t have to run like a thief. We have accidents like this all the time.’
We didn’t win the tournament, that honour went to Newcastle United with Fiorentina as runners-up, but I was able to finish as I began against Charlton in 1956. I scored two goals and played well enough to wonder, if only for a second or two, whether I had made the right decision to retire. It was so hard to think that I would never do this again, and all the emotion intensified in a restaurant later when the players gave me a standing ovation after presenting me with an Italian clock they had clubbed together to buy.
It was a beautiful object, the centrepiece of a statue depicting the four seasons – something that would have been quite beyond my means nearly twenty years earlier when I peered into the jeweller’s window in Zurich before buying my first watch. Inevitably, I choked up when I made my speech of thanks and attempted the impossible task of explaining what all the days I had spent wearing the shirt of Manchester United would always mean to me.
No doubt if Nobby had been there, he would have volunteered to help me home with the clock, but by then I would probably have been wise enough to decline with thanks. Enough to say, maybe, that I carried it back with great care, I put it on display immediately, and it still stands in the middle of my mantelpiece – one of the most important places in the house to me now.
24
WHAT NEXT?
THE QUESTION THAT had been nagging down the weeks and the months before I made my farewell on that soft Italian night was now, back home in Cheshire, as relentless as the ticking of the beautiful clock on the mantelpiece: what now?
Sadly, for this is something to be filed among my regrets, what happened next wasn’t the completion of any attempt to become a qualified coach. I had the strongest sense that any life outside football for me would be miserable, but although I knew this, I hadn’t responded in any practical way. Matt Busby wasn’t a qualified coach, nor was Bill Shankly, and privately I had always thought that if you were a strong enough character, and if you had been around the right people all your career and tried all you could to learn from them, you probably knew more than could ever be imparted in a lecture room, or out on a training field under the supervision of someone wearing a bib and holding a sheaf of notes. But of course, times were changing.
Nobby Stiles had joined the procession to the Lilleshall coaching centre almost as soon as his knees began to give way, and though he frequently found it a frustrating and exasperating experience, he had battled on. There was no doubt that within the game a network of coaches was creating a new culture, one which could leave you on the outside, however much fame you had won on the field.
I did look at the coaching programmes, but my first reaction was, ‘Oh, God, this will take ages’ – a bleak thought and one reinforced when people kept telling me, ‘You will have to start at the lowest level.’
Nowadays, of course, the perception is quite different. Someone like Roy Keane, so strong and independent as a player, saw that he would, for all his brilliant experience as a leader on the pitch, be disarmed if he didn’t have his coaching badges, and no doubt the training was a factor giving him confidence in his superb opening statement as a manager at Sunderland.
Because of my circumstances, the fact that I had built a strong profile for United and England, I was in quite a bit of demand from outside the game as my playing career wound down, and my friend and adviser Reuben Kay always urged me to take advantage of every overture that came my way. ‘Bobby,’ he said, ‘the most important thing in life is having something to do when you wake up in the morning. You always have to have somewhere to go. When you finish playing, you will still have half your life to live.’ I could see that easily enough, but the vital question concerned what I would be doing. Anything that did not involve football loomed for me as a kind of death.
When I made my last farewells at Old Trafford, and felt – if I am honest – a terrible uncertainty about what lay ahead, I had, after taking Norma, Suzanne and Andrea away for two weeks beside a warm, blue sea, no alternative but to wait for the phone to ring. It did, after three weeks.
The chairman of Preston North End, Alan Jones, was on the line. He wanted to come to see me and I said, ‘Yes of course.’ It was not as though my diary was crowded. Preston North End – I liked the sound of the famous old club, the team of Tom Finney. When he asked me to be manager I had several reactions all at once: new regret at not having worked on the coaching side, a certain apprehension about doing something I had never really considered, but then, dominating everything, was the sheer joy that came at the thought of returning so quickly to football.
I said yes, almost immediately, and maybe it is true that a lot of football men, and not least me, are deep down the purest of dreamers. Certainly my concerns about the coaching situation were pushed back into the margins. Surely I had played enough football, talked long enough with Jimmy Murphy, listened in to enough coaching sessions down the years, had sufficient an education in the game at the sharpest end, that I could do something at Preston?
In retrospect, I suspect I was probably caught up in a little flattery that worked against the uncertainties about my ability to manage, the concerns which in some important ways were well founded. No doubt I went into management a little too quickly. I should have weighed my situation more carefully, but this is wisdom long detached from my mood of the time. My brain was separated a little from my commonsense, and the reason was no mystery. The pressing reality was that I was desperate to feel good again, and, it came to me overwhelmingly, the only way that was going to happen was in football.
Unfortunately, the first season was extremely tough. It finished in relegation, but the board understood that I had inherited a difficult situation with quite thin playing resources, so there was no pressure that I might lose my post. By the following season, we had picked up momentum and I was beginning to see the job as more a pleasure than an ordeal. There was also a quite unforeseen bonus. Suddenly, I was playing again.
I was out with the lads on the practice field one day, and it occurred to me that I was enjoying every minute of it. I was fresh in my mind and my body felt relaxed. I made my passes, I ran easily as I geed up my players and then, when I was walking back to the dressing room, I thought, ‘This is ridiculous, we’re fighting so hard to get results, I’m doing everything except playing –
and I can still play.’
I talked to a few of the players and to Nobby, who had joined me as a coach, and everyone’s reaction was the same. They said it would be fantastic if I came back. I experienced a great wave of excitement as I rushed to the office to put through the papers for my registration as a player. Driving home, I felt almost boyish again.
In all I played forty-five times for Preston and scored ten goals, not a bad ratio for an old-timer roaming around midfield. One outstanding memory is of a cup victory back in my old terrain. We played the famous amateur warriors of Bishop Auckland on a pitch exposed to a bitter wind. As we went out on the field I thought to myself, ‘This is nearly as bad as Katowice.’ I hammered home to the lads that old Jimmy Murphy law: when you are playing a team of lesser status the most important thing is to run as hard as they do. This, Jimmy always insisted, invariably neutralises their one possibility of success, their chasing and hustling of the more skilful side.
One of our best players, Tony Morley, who would go on to Everton and Aston Villa, profited most from our busy approach, and we won more easily than the 2–0 margin said. I felt I was getting more into the job of management, and playing again was a tremendous release of pressure – and also of some of that accumulation of frustration which had started building when it became obvious that the Manchester United I once knew and loved appeared to be breaking apart.
Naturally, given all my time at Old Trafford, it was not so easy to shake off the particular pain of being involved in such a rapid descent from the mountaintop. There were days when I yearned for the old certainties of that time when, he would later report, Sir Matt Busby would have a wee dram of Scotch before a game, in the blissful confidence that his team would not only win but also demonstrate all that he considered worthwhile in football. In that time when the club was clearly going wrong, I had tried to keep my own counsel, but sometimes you did find yourself confiding some of your worries and fears in a trusted team-mate. In the absence of Nobby and Shay Brennan, Tony Dunne, who had also known the best of times, was most often my confidant. On several occasions we agreed that the going had become harder than we could ever have imagined in the glory of the mid-sixties.
As Wilf McGuinness, Frank O’Farrell, and Tommy Docherty had all battled to reverse the trend, it was as though they were in pursuit of the unattainable when they tried to reproduce the authority of the Old Man. ‘It’s crazy,’ I once said to Tony. ‘No one can be a new Busby. His personality was just too big.’
I tried to remember some of the lessons I thought I had learned at United as I went about my business in Preston, and there were days when I did feel, despite my regrets about the lack of coaching qualifications, that I was indeed making a little progress. I liked the atmosphere at Deepdale; it was a friendly club, a genuine football place, and I couldn’t complain that the board were ungenerous. I also felt I was learning another side of football, the tougher aspects of the game you miss when you spend your playing career at places like United, Liverpool and Arsenal. At the top level, you take so much for granted: the first-class travel facilities, the fact that you walk a few yards after a match and a luxurious bus is waiting to whisk you away, staying in the best hotels, the way the team can be strengthened when a clear weakness has become apparent. It is why somebody like Alex Ferguson is eager today to send off young lads on loan: when he sent David Beckham to Preston, it was to give him more than the chance to play against mature players; it was also to toughen him to some of the realities of football life beyond a place like Old Trafford.
Recently, I saw a young manager from a lower division club in the reception lounge at United and I asked him how he was doing. He said, ‘I’m fine, but you know it is a struggle sometimes. I think I would go mad if I didn’t get to see how football is at the highest level, how good it can be. I’m not looking for players tonight, just seeing football as it should be – I’m just recharging the batteries.’ The remark took me back to Deepdale and my own battle to adjust to the manager’s life. In the end I concluded that if you attempt it without the coaching background – and without membership of that school of football men who, like Alex Ferguson each day, spend so much time talking to each other on the phone, spinning off ideas – you almost certainly need lots of money, and maybe an excessive reliance on the word of agents.
It was the workings of the transfer market that persuaded me that my position in that second season at Preston had become untenable. The problem was that some of the directors seemed to have started going behind my back. When I confronted them with my suspicion that they were contemplating moves without consulting me, they told me they wanted me to sell a player I didn’t want to part with and to buy back one I had already sold.
It turned out that they had already made overtures to Newcastle for the return of Alex Bruce, a small, lively striker who had been sold at what I thought was a very good price. I said that I considered this behaviour unacceptable. Their response was that in order to fund the Bruce signing – which I told them would be a bad move because in football you do not go back on a decision like that – I had to sell John Bird, a big and very capable central defender, a player I regarded as the backbone of my team.
I told the directors that if there was one player in the club we shouldn’t sell it was this big lad. I also pointed out that in the lower divisions there were a couple of crucial positions: you needed someone who could really head the ball up front, and someone who could hold a defence together. John had proved he was the latter. I argued my case with as much force as I could muster, saying finally, ‘I can’t stay here if you sell him.’ There was a short pause before one of the directors said, ‘Well, we still want to sell him.’
I told them I was sorry, but I couldn’t operate on those terms. I wasn’t disillusioned as I left Deepdale. I had been around football all my life and I knew what it could do to people. The good and the bad that it could deliver. No, my feelings had mostly to do with what I had learned about myself. Maybe I had been right to be suspicious of my aptitude for the job when I drove with the Old Man to Scotland, and wondered if I was expected to make a case for myself as he pondered over possible successors, but I had enjoyed so much of my time at the club. Most of all I had loved the fact that I was still involved in football.
On the good days I was defying the fears of my family, so deeply embedded in the game, and also the fears that grew in me, as I neared the end of my playing days, that this next stage of my life might be something of a wasteland because, as one of them said, ‘Everyone can’t run a pub.’ But now, maybe, I had to think again. Perhaps I really did have to enter a world which I had never known, the one of work or business which I had been able to escape so easily up to this point. Of course I had a degree of celebrity, people might want me to open a shop or a sports centre, but what would I put at the core of my life which had always been filled by football?
Preston might have been the foundry where I forged the rest of my life, but it had proved not to be so, which of course made for a reflective drive down the motorway and into the leafy lanes of Cheshire. Maybe, if I could have seen into a future where a player not yet twenty could make enough money, if wisely invested, to keep him and his family in luxurious security for the rest of his life, my apprehensions might have been tinged with a certain bitterness, but I doubt it. Whatever happened in the next few months and years, I would always have the great days of my life. I would always have George and Denis in Lisbon, Nobby in Madrid and at Wembley for United and England, and there would always be the image of the Old Man and a time when everything was so fine – and so sure.
One thing I can say for myself is that I have never been prone to jealousy, which is no doubt something from which I cannot take too much pride when I consider the good fortune that has accompanied me ever since I first realised I could play football better than most of my schoolmates. I think this is true of a lot of players of my generation who had some success. They accept that you cannot change history, that you can only g
et the best of what is available to you in your own day, and for me that was pleasure and pride.
Certainly I was a little sad when I realised how bitter my uncle Jimmy, who played for Bradford and Leeds, had been made by the fact that his career came several generations before what might be described as the football goldrush. He was the uncle I was least close to as a boy, and perhaps it was because of this that, when we met at a family funeral, I was eager for him to join me for a United game. I said we could see a good match and make up for a little lost time. But he wouldn’t hear of it. He tore into the game, saying, ‘Bobby, I wouldn’t go near a bloody football match.’ He was angry about the escalation of wages in the game, the fact that he had missed out on rewards which he believed, when he compared them to those he had received in a long career, were grotesque.
Although my earnings had been modest by the standards of football today, they had been better than those of most of the lads I had grown up with. I had a lovely family, a nice house and a bit of a name. It was not as though I had been thrown in the street after my experience at Preston, and it would have been outrageous to have felt sorry for myself.
My first rescuer was Freddie Pye, a successful businessman who had always been involved with football, and whose passion for Manchester City had never interfered with our long friendship. Freddie called me to say, ‘I have a travel business, Bobby, and if you would care to be a director maybe we could try to use your name – but come in anyway, you’re my pal.’ I thanked him and said I would be along. Then I got into my business suit, walked to my car and started the second half of my life.
My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography Page 29
