All this made it remarkable that United should emerge under his guidance for a third time with a third team of great brilliance, but in some ways, I know, he became almost the reluctant leader.
People told him, ‘You’re still the only one who can do the job’ and he accepted the burden. He felt he had to because if Jimmy Murphy was a superb lieutenant, and the most courageous stand-in when his beloved boss lay in a hospital in Germany, he was not, by his own admission, a natural leader of a great football club. That was Matt Busby’s renewed destiny – but as the years wore on you could see clearly the cost to him.
What happened in the long run after Munich was a kind of miracle, no doubt, and the Old Man never ceased to be an inspiration and a force – but sometimes, towards the end of his reign, he confided to me that a combination of weariness and pain had taken an unshakeable hold. He yearned for someone to take up the burden, so that he could withdraw into the margins – but be sure that the club that had become his life would be secure.
It would take a quarter of a century for that man to present himself in the form of Alex Ferguson, but of course in the meantime, the job had to be done and a football empire preserved.
The first part of the campaign was survival, and on the opening day of the 1958–59 season that objective seemed to be attainable to an extent beyond anyone’s dreams, not least my own. I scored three goals in a 5–2 defeat of a Chelsea who could not build on a piece of brilliant individualism by their new young scoring sensation, Jimmy Greaves – and if you listened to the sound of the 52,000 Old Trafford crowd you might have believed that suddenly mere survival was the least of our challenges. There had been serious fears that our Wembley appearance against Bolton a few months earlier had been a step away from reality, and that the patching up done on the team in the days after Munich would break apart soon enough.
But wasn’t there magic in the air again? We prayed so hard that it was so, and three days later, at the City ground, Nottingham Forest were put to the sword as mercilessly as Chelsea. In just over twenty minutes we were three up and untouchable. I scored two more and Albert Scanlon seemed healed and was brilliant again. He had undermined the Chelsea defence with his speed and his crossing and he was no less sharp against Forest, scoring our second goal. Here, surely, was a powerful symbol of the team’s resurrection. Before we flew to Belgrade, Albert had been rampant in that unforgettable game at Highbury, and now he had regained his pace and his confidence – at least it was convenient and uplifting to think so.
There were gaps in our side, both physically and mentally – deep down we knew that, I think – but in football there is always the element of hope and potential and this was, by any standards, a remarkable start to a season which had been greeted with such apprehension. Not only did little Ernie Taylor appear to be comfortably maintaining his ability to create rhythm with his precise and clever passing, but my friend Wilf McGuinness was producing performances of such power and confidence that within weeks he had made a stunning arrival in the England team. No young player had ever faced a more daunting challenge; he had to run in the footsteps of Duncan Edwards in both the shirt of Manchester United and England, but if this created any doubts in his mind, he concealed them magnificently. His running and tackling created great surges of conviction through the team. Looking back, it is so easy, and with hindsight so distressing, to remember how passionately Wilf embraced the vision of United as the team who would not, could not, be snuffed out by the cruelty of Munich.
He was a great friend and a great competitor, and it was one of the quirks of life then that when I was getting married, and nominated him as my best man, the ruling wisdom of the day was that it would be wrong for him, a Catholic boy like so many of my closest friends at United, to take those duties in a Protestant church. Maurice Setters, who was made of similar tough material and came to us from West Bromwich as a man to give us some force and steel, took over Wilf’s duties in the church – and in the team. Maurice was signed soon after Wilf broke his leg in a reserve match, a personal tragedy that was fought against with courage right up to the moment medical advice came crashing in on the spirit of a player cut down so early, so harshly.
Wilf’s disaster came a year after his extraordinary efforts to repair the damage that had been inflicted on the club. For everyone in the dressing room it was another terrible reminder that in football danger can lurk at moments of the greatest certainty. Wilf McGuinness was surely set for a great career, but then so had been Duncan Edwards and John Doherty. Duncan had gone in the great tragedy; John and now Wilf had suffered the kind of random blow that football can deliver at any moment. It gave me another jab of anxiety.
On reflection, it was as though the sad fate of Wilf confirmed one apprehension at Old Trafford – that maybe our present run into second place in the league was more than anything a mirage, an illusion that took us away from certain truths. The fact was that, despite a run of victories, an impressive revival after some drastically sliding form before Christmas, we were never going to catch Wolves, the eventual champions
