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
