Ushering us through the airport in Belgrade, Busby had no doubt been concerned by the need for a prompt departure and swift completion of our trip. The requirement to rush home to Manchester through the snow-filled skies of Europe had been spelled out by the Football League, which had been so emphatic in its refusal to give a blessing to our Continental mission. Under new league regulations, any team competing in Europe had to be back in England a full twenty-four hours before they were due to play a championship game. League secretary Hardaker no doubt argued that he was protecting the ‘integrity’ of the Football League, preventing important matches being squeezed into the programme in the shadow of European action. Another interpretation was that he was making it as difficult as possible for the man who had defied him with his insistence that United would fight on this new frontier of football.
The Old Man had placed an extra burden on his team, and himself, but Dennis and I agreed that if any type of football team was equipped to take on the challenge of a long domestic season and the new demands of European competition it was surely one bred in England. Though we had so much work to do at home, there were good reasons to believe that we could cope with the physical pressure of another European semi-final and the possibility of an appearance in the final on top of commitments in the league and FA Cup. Certainly it had not been any crisis of stamina that had caused our downfall against Real Madrid the previous season. Indeed, the Old Trafford crowd, and some of us in the dressing room, had decided that if the second leg had stretched on for a few more minutes there would have been a very good chance of us getting the goals which would have earned a replay and ultimately a final against Fiorentina, a team we would have strongly fancied ourselves to beat.
Pushing ourselves to our physical limit, Dennis and I agreed, was simply part of the job. It was something which we trained for intensively in the pre-season, and which was built into us by the work we had to do on often heavy pitches and under the demands of crowds who never made any secret of the fact that as long as we were on the field we were obliged to give maximum effort.
Many years later the great Dutch player Johan Cruyff would say that in club football the English player was always hugely respected for his willingness – and ability – to fight until the last kick of the game. He said that the great fear of even the top European teams, heavy with skill and tactical nous, was that an English team would never know when it was time to quit.
The victory against Bilbao the previous season had been a classic of resolution and pressure evenly distributed over a game which required a 3–0 victory, and against Real Madrid we had absorbed the barbs of di Stefano, Kopa and Gento and finished the game, having clawed two goals back, pressing into the howling expectations of the Stretford End. Such recollections brought Dennis and me to another point of agreement: we were as keen as mustard to get back to England and carry on the battle.
When we landed in Munich the weather was as bad as I had ever seen it on my football travels; beneath the low clouds the sky was filled with snowflakes, and when we landed we saw there were six or seven inches of slush on the runway. However, we were assured that we would be on our way soon enough. While we had coffee in the terminal, the plane would be routinely refuelled along with everything else that needed to be done, both to the aircraft and the runway. It was nothing to do with us; our job was to play football, not debate the value of de-icing procedures or safe levels of runway slush.
The mood of the team was still happy, even bubbly, as we returned to the plane. If we had any fears they had only to do with the possibilities of delay and missing the Hardaker deadline. The airline had a job to do, they had to get us home. We had done our work for the time being.
Travelling was not pleasant in those days before the jet engine. Everything seemed to take so long, and sometimes it seemed as though you might be in the sky forever. It was also true, as I mentioned earlier, that I never enjoyed the Elizabethan aircraft. It always felt as if it was too heavy for its own good, an impression heightened by the fact that it seemed to take far too long to climb into its flight path. However, for me, and I think most of the party, there was no point of concern until after the second aborted take-off. Then the mood dipped, not in any dramatic way but quite perceptibly; certainly conversation became less chirpy and the card players were less absorbed by their game. Frank Swift, the former Manchester City and England goalkeeper, who was now a football reporter for the News of the World, demanded to know what was going on, and was told that there was a small technical problem that was being sorted out. I just assumed that there was a shortage of power, and that it was something they were working on and were determined to get perfectly right before we took off.
After a brief second coffee break in the terminal, we returned to the plane hurriedly and to assurances that everything was now fine; our home journey to Manchester would proceed without any further interruption. The issue of de-icing and clearing away the slush from the runway would later be key elements of the inquiry into what had gone wrong, along
