There was one great relief for me as I returned to the challenge of football. It was that I had missed the funerals of all my friends. I say this, and it is something I have thought about many times, because I just don’t think I could have coped with my feelings in a public setting. Maybe it was my youth, maybe my nature, but I have never, not one day since the tragedy happened, lost my respect for what Harry Gregg and Bill Foulkes managed to achieve in the minutes and the days and then the weeks and the months that came after.
The fact that I went directly from Germany to the North East had nothing to do with my medical situation, at least my physical condition. I had a cut on my head, but the stitches could have been removed anywhere. What I was suffering, I know now, was a great weight of grief. For a little while, I just couldn’t get out of my head the enormity of what happened. Looking back at myself in those days, I see that everything had changed for me profoundly. Before the accident I was always advised by players who I respected so deeply. I was the kid asking the questions, and then, suddenly, it was different: I was supposed to be the experienced hand. I’d played against Real Madrid, I had played in a cup final and people were talking about me as a future star of England, but if everyone thought I was experienced, that I had grown quickly into the role of an elder statesman, the truth was that inside there was no difference. So much more might now be expected of me, on and off the field, but, when I looked at myself, on the inside I was still just an ordinary lad. I wasn’t a captain, I was a young player still learning my trade.
All that had happened to me was that from the moment I sat beside Uncle Tommy in the stand at Old Trafford I was obsessed with the idea that this football club would indeed get back on the road to progress; it would grow strong again. I couldn’t advise Jimmy Murphy on his next move into the transfer market; I couldn’t come up with some tactical masterplan, but I could respond to suggestions I heard that the club might go under, that the effect of Munich would not in the long run be a point of defiance, an inspiration, but the start of a relentless decline. I could play better than I had ever done before. I could carry with me the memory of Duncan and Eddie, Roger and Mark, David and Tommy, and Billy and Geoff every time I went on the field. I could help us avoid relegation, which would have been the first terrible suggestion that we might be on some irreversible decline. I could help drive us towards Wembley – and the chance to bring some joy back to the United fans who had seen a team that had grown so huge in their lives die before their eyes.
I could help to prove that there was indeed life left in Manchester United. I felt that belief course back through my body and my heart.
12
RESURRECTION
THERE WAS NEVER a morning when I woke up with a great conviction that my destiny was to be a vital figure in the resurrection of Manchester United – it was just that I knew I could play a part, and that I had this tremendous belief that the job could be done.
It was inevitable, I worked out, that those of us who had survived the crash would be looked up to in a certain way, as though our escape in itself had given us a certain aura. That didn’t have to weigh us down. It just meant that we had to play at the peak of our ability every time we went out on to the field – and also be grateful that our survival in the FA Cup had given us such a clear focus for our effort to get some life back into the club.
Above all, the situation was a reminder of something that I had learned very early as a young pro. Football allows you to detach yourself from everything that is going on in other parts of your life. You have a job to do, a position to fill, and in those weeks after Munich there surely could not have been a finer therapy. In trying to record your life as accurately as possible there is maybe a temptation to compartmentalise all of your experiences: Munich was rock bottom; the march to Wembley in the wake of that experience was uplifting and liberating, a new dawn.
Well, of course, life isn’t parcelled up so neatly. Munich hadn’t made a mature philosopher of me overnight. I was still just a kid who had had a bloody awful experience. However, there was no doubt about the value of the therapy that came with our involvement in the cup. It was as good for the players as it was for the fans. We had something to play for, and they could go back to their old places in the stand and start making new dreams for a new team. Looking back, I see that this feeling of renewal, the idea that something could still be made out of the future, did more than anything to get me over the worst of the memories.
For so long I had felt so lucky to have arrived at such a
