My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography

work in the rain and the wind, hour after hour, with some young player he thought of as a real prospect, but he could not bear to tell a player that, in the end, he had failed his test as a professional. That, he said, was a manager’s job. Jimmy didn’t want to hire or fire, he didn’t want to impart news that he knew would cast a shadow over a young person’s life. He was a teacher, a passionate and sometimes unscrupulous motivator, but if you wanted somebody to do the nitty and the gritty and the dirty of the manager’s job you had to look elsewhere. The problem, though, was that United couldn’t do that when Matt Busby lingered between life and death. Murphy was Busby’s right arm and now that limb had to come into play. It did so magnificently. The background enforcer stepped into the harshest of light.

One of his shrewdest decisions, and a big reason why we were able to make our run on Wembley, was to more or less withdraw his young team from the post-Munich cauldron of Manchester. He realised that there was nowhere a young player could go in the city without feeling the great build-up of emotion and expectation. So much of it was meant kindly, but in the end pressure is pressure and Murphy rightly concluded that somehow it had to be dispelled.

His solution was to take us on frequent trips to Blackpool and the familiar, and relaxing, environment of the Norbreck Hotel. There we trained, walked by the sea, and had saunas which seemed sometimes to be doing more than drawing out sweat and impurities: you could sit in there and look at the wooden walls and feel cut off, utterly, from a world that at times seemed to be too close, too demanding. It was as though United had become too popular, too much a piece of public property.

This was still the feeling when we travelled down to London for the final. Every newspaper headline, every broadcast named us as the nation’s team – everywhere, that was, except Bolton. Five years earlier Bolton Wanderers had battled against such country-wide partisanship when they came close to wrecking the romance of the ‘Matthews Final’. This time they went a step further. They beat us 2–0.

Bolton had played hard but also well, and we had no bitter complaints. The Old Man was frail and grey on that spring day, and you could see on his face what an effort of will it had required from him to come to the famous ground and re-immerse himself in the passions of a big football match. He thanked us again for our performances and our willingness to give everything we had to the club. His words touched my belief that in a way the result of the cup final had been irrelevant. The important thing had been to get to Wembley. In the rush of games that followed the suspension of our season, and which we mostly lost, slipping to a final position of ninth in the league, the idea of getting to the final was the spark, the link with the past, and the inspiration.

The European Cup also went the way of the league. I flew off with England on their summer tour, while my United team-mates travelled by train to Milan to defend their 2–1 first leg advantage against such brilliant individuals as Juan Schiaffino of Uruguay and Nils Liedholm of Sweden. The Old Man stayed at home to continue his recovery and hear, with a sigh, that his survivors, his new boys and his veteran stop-gap signings, had gone down 4–0.

So we had to settle for the Wembley experience which, as symbolism went, was potent enough. When the sirens blared on the field in Munich, Harry Gregg, Bill Foulkes, Dennis Viollet and I had been confronted with a future that made no sense and gave no encouragement. We grieved for our team-mates and we feared for what might lie in our own futures. Not one of us could have believed that in three months’ time we would be playing in an FA Cup final. It told us, and the rest of the football world, that Manchester United were not a club who would go down easily. At the time the Old Man was asked how long it would take for his team to be a power again. Uncannily now when you look back, he said it would be five years.

13

FAMILY MATTERS

FIVE YEARS IS a long way down the road of a football club – and a man’s life. Everything can change in that time and for both Manchester United and me it did.

United signed Denis Law from Torino and I married Norma Ball. Both United and I were huge beneficiaries. Law invigorated United with his astonishing competitive personality and wonderful talent. Norma bowled me over in a way that no girl had ever done before and would never do again for the rest of my days. She made my life, gave it a dimension and a depth that was beyond my grasp right up to the day I met her.

This conviction was confirmed in the deepest way by our marriage at St Gabriel’s Church in Middleton, North Manchester and then by the arrivals of our daughters Suzanne and Andrea.

Because I am who I am, because there is something in me which has always made me uncomfortable with the celebrity side of football, I was a little disconcerted when some United fans showed up at the wedding in their red scarves, noisily offering their best wishes by wielding their rattles, but I was sure they meant well. I also suspected that nothing less than a full-scale earthquake could have detached me from the view that this was the happiest, most significant day of my life.

Certainly in the ensuing forty-seven years there would never be a single moment when I had cause to doubt that