Soon enough, that feeling would be all the more intense when my football education became full time, when I travelled across the country and abroad and the start of my working shift was signalled by the referee’s first whistle. Then life was filled to the brim with pleasure – and not least in Switzerland, where United played in an annual youth tournament. There, in Zurich, I stood outside a shop window for a long, long time, trying to decide on the present I would buy myself to celebrate my new status. Then, proudly, I walked inside to buy my first watch.
5
LEARNING TO BE A PROFESSIONAL
ON ONE OF the higher slopes, beneath the peak occupied by Duncan Edwards, I found Eddie Colman. He was a boy/man whose every stride and shimmy announced self-belief – but it was also clear to me that he would never be in danger of running away with himself.
He welcomed me so warmly into his family – in Archie Street in Salford, a road which would become the model for Coronation Street – that the breaking up of the Birch Avenue football gang after a year was quickly made to seem like just another milestone in days that were now beginning to race by at a sometimes breathtaking pace.
I was moved to this smaller house in Gorse Hill, which also had Old Trafford in sight, when the club decided that the smooth working of the former digs had been irreparably damaged. The problem was that the owner of the Birch Avenue house, Albert Watson, had been surprised and alarmed when his wife walked into their bedroom. He was supposed to be taking a siesta, and Mrs Watson was not pleased to see that he had been joined by one of the maids.
However, any sense of dislocation I might have felt, when the fall-out from the incident persuaded United that their boys should be moved on, was soon dissipated by the hospitality of Eddie Colman’s family, and also that of the parents of another youth team colleague, Wilf McGuinness.
Eddie would always ask me to spend Christmas Eve at Archie Street, which was wonderful, but quite hazardous once I had made the reserve team and we both had to play on Christmas Day, especially as the kick off was 11 a.m. We protested that we had to go to bed early, but it wasn’t so easy when Eddie’s Uncle Billy, who was a fine singer, arrived in full voice. Christmas, we argued weakly, could not be celebrated by dedicated young professionals, but it was very hard to avoid that drinking culture which was so much a part of the life of many professionals – and even of my mentor Jimmy Murphy. ‘You can’t go to bed,’ the Colmans cried. ‘Uncle Billy wants to sing for you – and he’s the best singer in the world.’ To fuel the celebrations, at short intervals someone went to the off-licence on the corner of the street, with a white enamel bucket to be filled with beer.
Eddie’s grandfather, who had a bushy moustache, was also a short man. He had served in the First World War in one of the bantam battalions, formed by men who stood less than five feet, and at a certain point in the evening he would tell of the day he marched past Lord Kitchener as he took the salute outside Manchester Town Hall. ‘I swear,’ he said, ‘that I heard him turn to the honour party and say, “Well, gentlemen, bigger men I may have seen, but smarter men, never.”’ Whenever I saw him I asked him about that famous day.
Eddie’s first role in my career was not supposed to be such a benevolent one. He had been told by Murphy to rough me up in my first practice match. Eddie was very flamboyant, even cocky, at our first meeting and he said to me, ‘Jimmy Murphy’s told me about you.’ After the practice, he said, ‘He told me to give you a kick or two and I tried my best, but I couldn’t get close enough.’ It was his quick and generous way of telling me I had been accepted, and in the following days he made it clear that he was my friend. He seemed especially concerned that I might get lonely in the new digs and, like Wilf McGuinness, he was eager for me to share in the family life that was so important to him.
Beyond friendship, though, on my side there was also pure admiration. I loved the swaggering way he played. It was especially thrilling to see him perform his ‘drag-back’, when he completely destroyed his marker with a dummy and then went off in an entirely different direction. I had never seen the move before and I shook my head and said, ‘Boy, imagine being able to do that.’ The crowd loved his confidence and they seemed to associate with him naturally. He wasn’t a great star, he was the cheeky-faced, mischievous boy from next door, but of course there was the great bonus that he could also play like an angel.
It was the first of my great privileges to play in the United youth team for two seasons with Eddie and with Duncan Edwards, and also work alongside, in the first year, Billy Whelan and David Pegg. Billy had brilliant close control and was a natural goalscorer. David was a traditional winger, quick and a great crosser of the ball.
However, Duncan, of course, and Eddie to a lesser but still brilliant extent, had other dimensions. They could lift the game on to another plane and you could hear the effect they had on the terraces, which for youth matches were amazingly well filled with crowds touching 30,000 and sometimes more.
