Inevitably, there were days when, without the adrenaline accompanying a big cup game, I would find myself back in some of the old confusion. Who could really explain what happened? Not a priest, not a psychologist, not Harry Gregg, who lived through all of it with maybe the most open of eyes. I was lucky, compared to Harry and Bill Foulkes – I saw only flashes of the horror. I was cosseted away from the worst of Munich. God knows what they witnessed, terrible, terrible things I have no doubt, but even they couldn’t answer that nagging question that wouldn’t go away: how could I be fifty yards away from the plane, alive, still attached to one of those big seats that were, when the house was hit, presumably just flung out from the middle of the plane where Dennis Viollet and I were sitting? I don’t know and I’ll never know. I can only go back to that amazement I know I will always feel about the fact that Harry and Bill were able to help people. This will always underpin my memories of that time when I seemed to have awakened to a kind of hell, with the Old Man groaning in pain and one team-mate lying near me, unmarked but plainly dead, whose identity, for reasons I’m now not completely sure of, will always be my secret, locked away very deeply.
Perhaps in other circumstances such a trauma would lose some of its rawness, because in the end I suppose time cures almost everything as it adds new layers of experience down the years, but with Munich this could never be so. It was a public matter, and the old who remember it want to talk about it as much as the young who have only read about it in books or seen it on old, grainy film. There is also another truth that cannot be denied. Munich changed not only those who were involved in it but also the club and the fans. United was no longer just a great football club: it embodied that experience, it was a dream that needed to be reawakened.
I think it helped me that I was always aware of my good fortune. It wasn’t something I ever had to work on, and it helped me to survive – as the club survived – because I felt a responsibility that went beyond my own concerns. It was not, anyway, as if I lacked any examples in the matter of fighting on through the worst of situations. Ultimately, there was the example and the resolution of the Old Man.
When he came back to Old Trafford his face was deathly pale and you could see all the pain etched so deeply into it. He had seen so much of his football revolution and, much more importantly, so much of his life disappear in the flames of Munich. He looked around the dressing room and you could see in his eyes how hard it was for him to note all the missing faces. Perhaps inevitably, tears came. He said that for the moment Jimmy Murphy was in charge, but he was always thinking of us and the job we were tackling so well. I think beyond everything, he felt guilt that it was on the business of his great football dream that his boys had died. He had thrown them into big-time football years ahead of their time, and they had not let him down. His eyes played across the faces of his new team, but they didn’t seem to engage in real contact. It was as though he was looking for a point of recognition, something to reassure him that really the horror hadn’t happened.
He left us with his favourite saying: ‘Enjoy your football, boys, express yourselves. Let your talent out.’ It was the classic belief that he would take to his grave nearly forty years later: a feeling about the way football should be played, the point of it, and when he returned as the master of Old Trafford, after convalescence in Switzerland, it would once again be at the centre of all he tried to achieve.
In the meantime, there was the job of winning the FA Cup, the league having slipped, predictably, out of our grasp with a string of defeats. It was a task Jimmy Murphy tackled with all his usual ferocity.
The tie against Sheffield Wednesday had been won on the greatest tide of emotion I would ever be part of in a football stadium, but it was a little different in the sixth round at West Bromwich. They were a strong and polished side, determined not to be caught up in the national wish fulfilment that United would rise up quickly to glory after the terrible events in Munich. In this, Albion were helped by some big-name players who were particularly keen to stick to the agenda of their own ambitions, notably wing half Bobby Robson, right back Don Howe and Derek Kevan, a big, strong centre forward who was in the process of bustling his way into the England team.
Jimmy Murphy’s desperate attempt to strengthen our team in the leeway provided by the FA’s waiving of the normal transfer regulations, had found a glint of gold in the signing of little Ernie Taylor. He might have been five years down the line from his massive contribution to the ‘Matthews Final’, but he still retained a wonderful sharpness of thought and skill. He
