There was no capping the rising passion. Four days later, more than 30,000 fans tried to gatecrash Old Trafford. This second match was really hard, and we were having to stretch ourselves a little now because adrenaline can carry you only so far; in the shortfall, there is a lot of painful running to do, a lot of sucking in breath and telling yourself that you have to find a little more in yourself.
West Brom were over-running us for most the game, but I kept thinking, ‘Well, maybe we can hang on, perhaps we can take some half-chance and nick it.’ We had to do that because I felt that they would be too strong for us if it went to a third game; most of the time we were hanging on the ropes. With a couple of minutes to go, the ball came to me as I ran into what I thought was a likely position out on the right side, something I had been given the freedom to do in the new set-up. I knocked it past the Albion left back, Stuart Williams, in pursuit of what Jimmy Murphy said was one of an attacker’s optimum situations – the ball in your control on the dead-ball line.
‘Get on to the dead-ball line,’ he would say, ‘because when you are there the opposition panic. They’re going in the wrong direction and you can’t be offside.’ Ideally, you have time to take a little look, but I was going too fast into a position about ten yards away from the corner flag. I had to be first to the ball because the referee was about to blow the final whistle and this might be the moment we could shape so much. I was able to answer another Murphy demand: ‘Catch the defender on his heels, and by the time he’s turned you’re gone.’ I was. When I did look up, I saw a single red shirt amid a clump of blue-and-white ones. God, I drove that ball in, putting into it everything I had left, and as I did so Colin Webster found a patch of space and turned it into the net. The crowd went mad; we all went mad; and when Bobby Robson was moaning after the match, I thought to myself, ‘Well, we were brave, we did stick to the job.’ Bobby was complaining, ‘We got bloody nothing from the referee, we didn’t get the bounce of the ball, and then they go and score right at the end.’
Jimmy Murphy was as ecstatic as the crowd because he had received from his players the gift he treasured most in football. His team had played beyond themselves and their physical resources because they knew, when they measured the odds that had piled up against them, that this was an opportunity that would not come again.
For the semi-final at Villa Park we drew a Second Division team, but one with some very special ingredients. Fulham had the magnificent general Johnny Haynes, Jimmy Hill, an eccentric but spectacular winger Tosh Chamberlain, a fine goalkeeper in Tony Macedo, the famous former striker, now converted midfielder Roy Bentley, an England left back Jim Langley, and a young, quick, right back who was taking his first strides towards the 1966 World Cup final – George Cohen.
This was a team with the balance of enough talent and enough experience to exploit the tiredness to which we had become increasingly prone with all the emotion that had gone into our performances in recent weeks – and which was a big factor when, just three days after our replay win, West Brom returned to Old Trafford and thrashed us 4–0 in a league match.
George Cohen recalled many years later that after the first semi-final match, which ended 2–2, I went up to him and said, ‘Well done, son,’ which I presumably intended as a gesture from a mature old pro to a young contender. I was, after all, a full year older than George. He had played well, but then so had I, scoring two and crashing one against the crossbar. In the replay at Highbury, Fulham had the fate I had feared for United in the quarter-finals against West Brom. They had had their moment, but it passed. Young Dawson, a powerfully built lad who maybe suffered down the road from the level of effort he was required to make through the months after Munich, put us in control of the game with a hat-trick. Then, after Fulham had fought their way back to 4–3, I was able to make the game safe in the ninetieth minute. I ran on to a ball on the right wing and hit it in my stride. It flew into the top corner. Somehow we had made it to Wembley – forty-nine days after the Munich air crash.
It was perhaps our finest moment since the tragedy, and in some ways the greatest achievement of my friend and my teacher Jimmy Murphy. He hated the limelight and as the Old Man recovered in hospital and then at home, he made it clear that he longed for the day ‘The Boss’ returned. Matt Busby was the leader; Jimmy Murphy was the faithful helper and minder. No manager ever had better cover for his back, no assistant was more selfless in his work for a club, its manager and its players.
Jimmy hated some of the jobs in football. He was happy to
