14
REBUILDING
THE GENIUS OF Matt Busby reappeared in those years of renewal after Denis Law made his dramatic entrance and Manchester United once again became a team of colour and excitement, but there had been a great weariness on his face when he calculated that it would take five years for the team to be truly recognisable again.
Law was signed for £115,000 in the summer of 1962, before we returned to Wembley to win the FA Cup against Leicester City after the long, bitter winter of 1962–63. I had seen him play many times for Manchester City before his move to Italy, and you could not but be impressed by his speed and his intelligence and that mysterious ability of all great players to suddenly appear in the right place at the right moment.
I was delighted the Old Man had made a signing of such quality – it worked against the idea that the club would never again touch the levels of consistent brilliance and excitement that were achieved in the years before Munich. I told Denis this when he arrived for his first training session. I said, ‘It’s very good to have you around,’ and he gave me that sidelong, slightly quizzical smile that would become so familiar to me down the years. It was as though a lot of the magic and the aura of the old United had been conjured up at a single stroke.
Matt Busby had also picked up Paddy Crerand from Celtic. He passed the ball quite beautifully, and, with Johnny Giles having an impressive game on the right wing, there was real quality in the performance which brought the club the FA Cup, its first trophy since the tragedy. Spring was turning into summer, after an unprecedented fixture pile-up, and there was real warmth and expression in our play. On this day we were no longer grinding out results, patching up our weaknesses. We looked like Manchester United again. We passed, we ran, we scored, easing up with the race well won at 3–1. For United, who had a young Irishman called George Best limbering up in the youth team, the promise was of the best of times.
However, before the arrival of Law and the eventual eruption of Best, sometimes it had to be admitted that even the five-year plan seemed to be an optimistic forecast. The reasons for this could not be avoided; you couldn’t have a great young side torn literally from the sky and expect to proceed with just a few missed heartbeats. This was especially so if the architect of not just a team but an idea, a unique philosophy, carried so much hurt and sadness in his eyes. The fact was that to be close to Matt Busby in that first year or so after the crash was to fear something that was very hard to admit; something that struck at the very heart of the drive for resurrection. It was that even if the Old Man managed to fight back with all the nerve and judgement at his disposal, and know great success again, the chances were he would never be quite the same as he was boarding that plane in Munich. He would never stop drawing the line between good players and great ones; he would never lose his vision of what football should be – and in the end he got to where his deepest ambition lay – but there were times when the struggle was desperate and you knew that he was suffering doubts he had never known before.
It wasn’t just a question of physical pain and the matter of whether he could any longer take the strain of the football life – his wife Jean, and so many admirers, led by Jimmy Murphy, persuaded him that he could do that in the days after we had fought our way to the 1958 FA Cup final. What became apparent was that his body could recover to some large extent, but his old conviction, his amazing ability to transmit confidence and composure, was beyond any complete healing.
During his recuperation in Switzerland in the summer, Jean Busby conquered her husband’s terrible doubts about the wisdom of his carrying on – and his belief that he had let down all those parents who had entrusted their sons to his care and his great European adventure. But down the years, one by one, the secrets of his torment became visible in a sigh, in a distant look in his eyes and – in the last crisis of his career, when so many blamed him for refusing to let new managers like Wilf McGuinness and then Frank O’Farrell have their heads – in a word or two to someone like me that he had reached a point when he no longer had the heart or the energy for the battle.
In the first months after Munich he doubted himself, his calling as the messiah of a great football club and, he confessed later, he even doubted the deep faith in God that had carried him through so many difficult days since, as a young boy, he lost his father in
