Derby County versus Wolves was a legitimate peak of any season. The great Peter Doherty had left the Baseball Ground by then, but there were still unforgettable characters on the field: Jackie Stamps, Billy Steel and Raich Carter for Derby, Billy Wright and Johnny Hancocks for Wolves. It was the first time I’d seen Carter, fair-haired and handsome and full of craft and confidence. As I walked with Uncle George after the game, away from the ground down the narrow streets separating the little houses, I had thought, ‘Is this really the way it is going to be? If it is, well, it will be magic.’
The exhilaration I felt as the teams lined up at Old Trafford, and I took my place alongside Billy Whelan and Dennis Viollet in the absence of my admired friend Tommy Taylor, was heightened by the fact that I had been forced to wait so long. There was also more than a flicker of apprehension. I was playing the most important game of my life while carrying an injury.
Although during the week I was fully engaged with my army duties, as was common with many footballers I received time off at weekends to play. I had been scoring freely in the reserves, building a reputation through the match reports in the Manchester Evening News and the Evening Chronicle. My hard work under the whip of Jimmy Murphy, everyone said, was becoming increasingly evident. Wherever I turned, someone was telling me, ‘You’ll get your chance soon, Bobby. Keep scoring goals and it will be only a matter of time.’ However, when there was a first-team injury or a call from England, it was always somebody else getting the nod. Johnny Doherty, who was a very talented ball-player and seen by many as a key element in the development of the Busby Babes, Eddie Lewis and Billy Whelan were ahead of me in the queue. It made it difficult to check the rise of anxiety. From time to time I would give myself a reassuring little pep talk, something like, ‘There’s nothing to worry about, keep playing as you can, keep believing in yourself, and one of these days Jimmy Murphy is going to say to Matt Busby, “Boss, it’s time to play the boy.”’
Most of the time, though, it was hard to suppress the fear that the conversation might not happen anywhere but in my own mind. At the worst of times, I thought, ‘Well, maybe you’re not as good as you think you are.’ Every little incident in a match or in training, every little comment from Jimmy Murphy or occasionally the great man Busby, would be measured for its significance. Something I would learn down the years was that playing football was never guaranteed to make a man feel secure, but the more you established yourself the easier it was to come to terms with the demands on your confidence – and the uncertainties. That’s not to say anything could ever be taken for granted but, of course, when you are young and you still have to prove yourself in any significant way, every disappointment is exaggerated, every single setback is multiplied.
There was another concern, one I had discounted so firmly when I first arrived in Manchester and my mother was insisting I carry on with my education or learn a trade. For the first time I had seen, with my own eyes, how precarious the football life could prove. It was when my rival John Doherty was wrecked by serious injury, and it made me wonder why I should think I was different from him. After all, he had outstanding ability and, like me, he had had more than enough encouragement to believe that football would be his life.
He had been troubled by his knees for some time, but one day I saw him in the dressing room when he was particularly depressed. He was showing someone the evidence of a recent operation. ‘This is what they did,’ he said, pointing to a knee which had a huge circular cut around the top. A potential cornerstone of Matt Busby’s empire, someone who had been showered with praise, was explaining why his great chance in the game might already have come and gone. He had had to submit to that primitive surgery, have his cartilage removed and the debris sluiced away, along with most of his football ambitions. A career filled with promise, in which he won a championship medal in the first wave of the new team in the 1955–56 season, was all but over almost before it had begun.
I had always said that injury was never going to happen to me, it was the disaster facing other players, but then it did – just at the time I was beginning to get more than a little desperate about winning a place in the first team.
I was undone by the weakness of my tackling while playing against Manchester City reserves. City’s big blond centre half Keith Marsden challenged me in a 50–50 situation and we both made contact with the ball at the same time. As Murphy might have feared as he saw the build-up to the collision, Marsden had prepared himself for the tackle rather better than me. My foot was hanging out and he hit it so hard I knew, instantly, that I
