Unaided by the Kenyan Football Association, Mathere has become more than a football club, they have become a symbol of hope for young people across great swathes of Africa brought so low by Aids and hunger and desperate poverty. They won the Kenyan league title, playing exuberant, joyful football, a force rising from the bleakest of possibilities; they pushed into Tanzania and Uganda; last year they were nominated for a Nobel Prize. They have given me images which no one could forget, not least of an immaculately dressed young man emerging from a slum, beaming with pride that he was part of something that brought the real hope of achievement.
Nearer home, the work of Macclesfield Town in holding clinics to fight depression among young people, a terrible scourge which has resulted in so many lost lives through suicides and drug abuse, is another example of how football can be a force for good. Laureus have put some money into the Macclesfield project, which has helped them to employ a group of counsellors. Broken marriage and indebtedness are some of the causes of despair, and where else can a young person go for quick and significant help beyond maybe ten minutes with some overworked GP? At Macclesfield Football Club that need is being supplied, and when I saw the effect of the effort, how comfortable young people were in going to the local football club, I said to a board meeting at Old Trafford, ‘If Macclesfield can do it, I’m sure Manchester United can.’ Now we do, and the response has been tremendous.
I do not wish to glorify or exaggerate my role in such magnificent work. My point is that if football has given me so much down all the years, not the least of its gifts has been an ability to put a little back into a world which has often dazzled me with its rewards. When I ran past that stand of mining implements in the primary school in Ashington, in a bright crimson jersey with a miner’s helmet under my arm, I couldn’t know those dreams I had in my young head would quickly pale into insignificance against the reality of what lay before me. I have met kings and presidents – and Nelson Mandela – for no better reason than that I was able to play football, to do that which was presented as a gift. I’ve been to every corner of the world and felt the affection, even the love, of those who see in football something that has brought enrichment and thrills to their lives.
So, of course, as long as I’m strong and energetic enough, there will be days when I put aside the slippers and old gardening sweater, and go off to some new assignment, some lingering part of the legacy that I was able to make for myself as a young man on the football field. In the meantime, there will be other days when maybe I take out a bottle of the good wine that Norma has stored away for special occasions, and toast all of those who I have known and loved, and played for and alongside.
Munich, as I have already made plain, will always be included in my recall of the best and the worst of my times; everything that has happened in the last fifty years of my life has been conditioned in some way by that tragedy. It is at the top of the list of all those things that in my memory’s eye can never be obscured, any more than the days of glory when Duncan Edwards was so young and powerful and, like the team he inspired, was going to last forever.
Of course no one lasts forever, but if you are very lucky, as I have been, you have a certain duty to remember and cherish all the best of what you have felt and seen. I have tried to write it all down here, and I have to say it has never been a chore. But then how could it be? So much of what I have known and seen has been a feast that I know will nourish me to the last of my days.
Maybe one of the most unforgettable contributions to such a belief came on a rainy day in Manchester in late January 1994. It was the day we buried the Old Man – the day we looked into the eyes of the thousands who crowded the streets and saw in their glistening tears the meaning of the best of what could be achieved by the game in which we had made our lives.
The Old Man always told us that football is more than a game. It has the power to bring happiness to ordinary people. In the sadness and the rain, that belief was the glory of his life – and the unbreakable pride I felt at being part of it. He was Manchester United and, I will
