Down the years there would be so many giants standing across my path, from Alfredo di Stefano and Pelé to Franz Beckenbauer, but there were times when I believed that after Duncan Edwards no one could have been more intimidating in his authority than Dave Mackay. Jimmy Scoular was famous for his ruthlessness and when, in a notorious incident, he yanked me back by my jersey when I was running clear on Newcastle’s goal in a match which, because of my background, had a special pressure, I came as close as I ever would to hitting somebody on the field – but Scoular was nearing the end of his career then and he never, despite that flashpoint, had the same impact on me as Mackay did.
Dave Mackay talked a lot on the field but, unlike many who did this, he never left you in any doubt that he would back up his words. He was a hard man who also had brilliant natural gifts. Once, in the 1965–66 season, we were being thrashed by Spurs and Mackay was in both overwhelming and overbearing form. Jimmy Greaves had scored an astonishing goal, dribbling around the goalkeeper, and we were feeling increasingly frustrated. We had no hope of getting back into the game, but of course you try to put on a good face against such a defeat and certainly I wasn’t prepared to surrender.
Mackay was trying to jockey me into a corner and when I pushed the ball to my left he said, a little derisively, ‘Go on then, shoot.’ I did so and the ball flew into the top corner of the net. We lost 5–1, but at least I had something at the end of a tough afternoon. Jimmy Murphy took a little comfort from this, too, because one of the things he hated most was to see any of his players giving even a hint that they were in danger of being overwhelmed by the opposition.
Such overpowering self-confidence, no doubt, was the aspect of Duncan’s play in which Jimmy gloried the most. As he proved when he came to face the cream of European football in Real Madrid, he was simply beyond intimidation. Victory was not a challenge but a right. There was no point in holding him back. The old arguments about carefully nurturing talent, and thus avoiding the risk of burn-out, didn’t apply in his extraordinary case. Those huge crowds came to see United’s youth footballers because they were fascinated by gauging their progress, seeing them growing stronger and more mature as their experience increased, but Duncan was plainly already a finished article. It was impossible to see what advantage might be gained by sending him down the usual route. So he was allowed to skip the A team and went straight in with the old, hard pros of the first team, doing it so naturally he might have been the veteran of a dozen campaigns.
His confidence, as I saw it, never touched on arrogance; he was who he was, which meant that he was a lovely, genuine lad. When he was gone, so suddenly, the void he left behind was so huge that those who remained, from Matt Busby to a young groundstaff boy like Nobby Stiles, were bound to ask how anyone else could begin to fill it. That feeling I had in the Youth Cup tie against Chelsea, when I came to take the corner kick, summed up the impact he had on all around him whenever he played. ‘Save me, save us,’ was the silent prayer I made when I floated in the kick and, yet again, he did exactly that.
There was something miraculous about Duncan’s soaring progress into the first team. Mine, I would learn in the months that stretched into several years, would proceed rather closer to the ground. Matt Busby didn’t work much with the kids; he occasionally took us to one side and gave us a word of encouragement when he walked out to the training field – once he pointed out to me that I was physically strong enough to put a little more into my tackling – but he was happy to leave us in the hands of Jimmy Murphy and, to a much lesser extent, one of the trainers, Bert Whalley.
Jimmy, as had been so clear from our first meeting, was the man. He was ever present on the training field in his track suit top and shorts, his pot-belly protruding with the evidence of how much he liked a pint. He was on me all the time, standing close to me as a practice match unfolded, chiding me, irritating me. I suppose he was testing my patience when things were not going right, as when he stepped into my path and tripped me when I was in full flight.
It was two years before he told me that he had completed the first part of his job, which had been, quite simply, to turn me from an amateur into a professional.
The first of my amateurish beliefs he stripped away was that the best, most talented footballers always win. ‘They don’t, you know, Bobby,’ he said. ‘They don’t when they fail to understand that there are two sides to the game – and only one of them is about how well you play. Just as important is how you stop the other fellow playing to his own strengths.
‘You can stop people playing if you mark them well enough – and it doesn’t matter who they are. So you have to learn two basics: you have to learn to mark someone, and avoid being marked yourself. You have to know how to steal a vital yard with a little dummy and
