Another sign of growing confidence was that I was no longer bashful about wearing the club blazer presented to you when you sign professional. There had been a time when its most regular airing was in front of the mirror back in the digs, but now I wore it in the street proudly – especially when, after training, I waited to see my new girlfriend, Norma Ball, as she left her office in Lever Street, which was the centre of Manchester’s rag trade.
Mike Yarwood, who was still to make his mark as the star TV impressionist of his time, worked nearby, and many years later he reported, ‘When you started to play regularly for United and then England, I remember thinking, “That’s the lad I used to see standing in the street in his blazer, looking like a top toff – and quite pleased with himself.”’
I had no right to look so pleased yet. I would have to fight off fresh waves of impatience before I could claim my own peg in the first-team dressing room, that holy of holies which had been guarded so ferociously by an old pro like Allenby Chilton. I was still the kid who stepped in for the big men, Tommy Taylor, Dennis Viollet and Billy Whelan; when they went down, I went in, and when they came back I stepped down. However, because big injuries were inevitable, a player in my situation was guaranteed plenty of work. The more I played, the more I realised the validity of that pressure from home to guard against the worst of fate.
Broken legs were the greatest fear, and one that would be horribly realised by my friend Wilf McGuinness, a tremendous force as he moved through the ranks and into the England team before being cruelly cut down in his twenties. Ligament injuries were also commonplace. A twisted knee for Tommy Taylor, for instance, was another chance for Bobby Charlton.
Despite the hazards, though, none of my boyhood dreaming had been seriously touched. Yes, I understood now a lot more about the professional game. I grasped, finally, that behind the joy there was also cruelty and pain. For everyone who succeeded, there would be a John Doherty or a Wilf McGuinness, intelligent and, in their different ways, hugely talented players who had failed only in the department of good luck. At Old Trafford, too, there was the additional pressure of expectations which had been primed by the first decade of Busby’s insistence that the club could have players only of the highest quality.
Naturally, I studied intently the special contributions of the players whose level of performance I had to try to reproduce when the call came for me to fill in somewhere along that glittering forward line.
Dennis Viollet was slim and deadly quick. My feeling was that he was so prone to injury because he was so thin. His bones seemed too close to the surface, and this was maybe the root of my theory that it is the people who are without a little bit of fat who are most likely to go down hurt. As an inside forward, he was expected to be creative and he rarely disappointed in this respect, but it was in the penalty box where he was often unplayable. Just ten days before I made my debut against Charlton, he had left me in a state of awe when he scored four goals against Anderlecht in the famous 10–0 thrashing of the Belgian champions in the first round of the European Cup. At a rain-lashed Maine Road – Old Trafford was still awaiting floodlights – it was dazzling to see such tigerish finishing. Later there was a rare comment from the man in black, Welsh referee Mervyn Griffiths, who was as stunned as everyone else: ‘You couldn’t pick an England team to beat this United,’ he declared.
Viollet was the cutting edge, the wielder of the rapier. Matching the effect of Billy Whelan, the man so admired by the Brazilians, was a different but no less demanding challenge for me. The Dubliner was tall and nothing like as quick as Viollet. His forte was to scheme, to shape possibilities with his skill and excellent vision. Yet Whelan scored so many goals from midfield he would be a wonder of today’s game. In 1956–57 he finished with a stunning twenty-six, three more than the club’s top scorer the following season, Viollet. Wherever I looked there was competition of a daunting kind.
In those days there was a basic requirement for a centre forward. He had to be good in the air. Tommy Taylor was wonderful, but he was also superb on the ground. He was so quick, and had such good control, he could go through half a team. He was a beautiful athlete, but one who had terrible knees. For him, he admitted to me on several occasions, a professional football career meant living on a knife edge. Sometimes he would show me how his knees worked – and sometimes didn’t. The joints would go off in directions far from normal. He would shake his head, and say, ‘Well, Bobby, I just have to play.’ In his circumstances, he did it with extraordinary courage, but when he couldn’t it would be another call-up for me.
Injury was one of the aspects of the game on which you just couldn’t afford to dwell. Another was that, even though your career could be cut off at any moment, the most you could expect as long as you stayed healthy was a
