One key to a successful team is a balance of respect, an understanding of the strength of individual players but also the wider sense of dependency on each other. The captain had no separate lists in the matter of criticism if there were mistakes on the field. Whoever you were, you could be exposed to the force of his leadership. It didn’t matter if Duncan Edwards did something amazing if other members of the team let themselves down. Nor was Duncan shielded from criticism when he had Roger Byrne’s critical eye on him. Sometimes even the big man felt a shaft of the captain’s displeasure.
There were no challenges to the captain’s rule. He led by example game in, game out. He was never flustered, never panicky. He had that little bit more experience than the rest of us. He was the founder member of the Busby Babes, the second oldest member of the team, and though he was still two days short of his twenty-ninth birthday when he led us on to the plane in Belgrade, he had the bearing of a general who knew that he had just led his young army to yet another striking achievement.
It was only later that I would learn that Roger Byrne was subject to terrible superstition and some dark fears. Behind the front of confidence there were, it turned out, some of the doubts that we all shared in the small hours of the night in some distant hotel room. Once, his roommate John Doherty reported, Byrne woke up at 3 a.m. to report that he had had a terrible dream. He never told John the detail of the nightmare, merely conveying the sense of an awful premonition. It was a haunting episode for Doherty because it happened on the eve of a routine cup tie against Bristol Rovers, and, in a season which saw United take the title by eleven points, the cup performance was a disaster. United lost 4–0. No one could remember such an incoherent performance from the team that down the years had become known as the Red Devils.
According to John, there was another strange incident later in that 1955–56 season. Again Byrne woke up in the small hours complaining of a nightmare. This time he had dreamed of missing a penalty in a vital game, and he declared that if a penalty was awarded in the coming game with Blackpool – one that could settle the title – there was no way he would take it. Predictably in the circumstances, United were given a penalty and Roger asked Johnny Berry to take the kick, but Johnny said, ‘I don’t mind – you take it.’ Byrne’s face clouded over, he yelled, ‘You take the penalty,’ and then he turned his back. To everyone’s great relief, Berry scored, and Byrne promptly reverted to a mask of absolute authority.
Something else not widely known about our captain that February morning in Belgrade was that in the two previous Februarys he had had life-threatening experiences.
In 1956 he had driven his car into a lamp-post and broken his collarbone. In the following year, he had crashed near the Busby home in the Manchester suburb of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, and the Old Man had rushed the short distance to the scene of the accident. He was immensely relieved to see that on this occasion Roger had escaped serious injury. This did not stop him delivering a fierce lecture on the need for safe driving. At the time the captain was the only member of the team who owned a car, and Bill Foulkes later reported that on one occasion he and Ray Wood had been passengers on a white-knuckle ride with Byrne at the wheel. Wood swore that he would never travel with the captain again.
Any superstitious dread was hidden when Roger Byrne strode on to the chartered British European Airways Elizabethan – call sign G-ALZU AS 57 – at Marshal Tito airport on the morning of 6 February 1958. His face was impassive and, like all of us who marched up the steps, two by two, he was extremely sure of himself and, of course, indestructible.
11
MUNICH
IT WAS A wonderful state of mind we took on to the plane and in its last few hours of life it had maybe never been more intense. In the cabin there was a buzz of conversation and bursts of laughter and the card players were aggressively at work. We were heading home for yet another red carpet welcome, another return of conquering heroes.
I spent much of the flight to Munich, where we would put down for refuelling, discussing with Dennis Viollet how it was that we had so suddenly fallen away from our complete mastery of Red Star in the first half. It was true that we had come through the crisis well, but it was one we should really have avoided. We had been forced to survive in a match we had seemed at one point to control completely. Maybe, we speculated, it had something to do with the after-effects of the Highbury thriller, which had received rapturous press accounts. Perhaps also there was a little concern that we had to hold back something for Saturday’s challenge against Stan Cullis’s league-leading Wolves. This match, certainly, was clearly on the mind of the Old Man, who, having been denied an historic Double of league title and FA Cup the previous spring, had set his heart on three straight titles to match the achievement of Herbert Chapman’s Arsenal back in the thirties. If we were to stay in the race, we had to take two points off Wolves; we had to show that what happened against Arsenal, and against Red Star in the first half,
