Under Cullis, Wolves had kept their strength and their standards and while we fell away from contention the following season, they failed to keep their title, against the challenge of an impressive Burnley team, by just one point. Tottenham were also back in the race now, fortified by David Mackay alongside Danny Blanchflower, and with Cliff Jones producing remarkable form on the left wing, and were about to achieve the Double – the milestone that the Old Man had held so high in his ambitions before Munich. Underlining our discomfort was the fact that the quality of the Tottenham football, particularly, could not fail to remind us of the levels United had achieved before the crash.
It was around this time, I suppose, that I acquired a certain reputation for being a little aloof, and perhaps somewhat reluctant to accept the arrival of players I didn’t know and had not grown up with in the way I had the Busby Babes.
I believe the truth was that I felt I had enough to do just playing my game; I didn’t feel equipped to do anyone else’s job and, for example, I was a little uncomfortable when the Old Man came to me and asked my opinion of Maurice Setters in the wake of Wilf’s injury. What did I think of him? Maurice became a good friend, but I didn’t really know him at that point. All I could say was that he was an extremely strong presence when he played for West Bromwich; you knew you had a serious opponent on the field when he showed up so obviously full of determination and ready to tackle anyone. But would he fit in, was he a United player? I just didn’t know. I was, I reckoned, still too much of a kid to pass such judgements.
As it turned out, Maurice played with great commitment for the club before he finally lost his place to Nobby Stiles after suffering a knee injury; he had a good spirit and good humour, and I always recall with a smile the time we played together at Liverpool in an especially hard-fought game. We were pushing to get back into the match and were about to take a throw-in. Maurice bustled over to the touchline to collect the ball but a young lad kept hold of it. Before joining United, Maurice had had talks with Liverpool, but he was still amazed when the boy, with the ball still tightly gripped in his hands, said, ‘Maurice, why didn’t you come to us? Were the clubhouses not good enough for you?’
This was a period when my perspective was that things had been happening to me very quickly, and then suddenly people were coming to me for views and opinions that I didn’t really feel ready to give. This included other players who had problems, and there were times, if I am honest, when I wondered how long some of the new players would last at the club. It was not a question, at least in my own mind, of my passing negative verdicts on any of those who had come into the void left by Munich, and if my demeanour was a little cool maybe it was because, despite the goals and the upward profile of my career, I too was in the position of just feeling my way forward.
Certainly I could see the point of Ernie Taylor’s craft and the tackling power of Stan Crowther – and the skills of Albert Quixall, who joined us from Sheffield Wednesday in 1958 for a record fee then of £45,000. Albert played a significant role in my rush of goals – when I broke through an offside trap often it was to get on to the end of one of his perfectly placed passes. However, it was also true that Albert, behind the image of a new blond star of English football, had his own difficulties in settling down in a club which expected so much from everyone, and not least from a record signing.
It would be wrong now to ignore my sense that in the club’s hope and determination to rebuild there was not also a touch of panic. You couldn’t have the old seamless growth in the new situation in which we found ourselves; inevitably there was a need to speculate and take chances.
In the meantime, we had to battle as best as we could towards a point of breakthrough. That came, I believe, with the signing of Denis Law. Before that Matt Busby and Jimmy Murphy had had to probe the market with limited funds, and therefore had to look for the best in home-grown young players like Alex Dawson and Mark Pearson. At the time it didn’t create in me an overwhelming feeling that our future success was in any way guaranteed. The boys were rushed into action and they did well for a time, but there was an immense pressure on them and I imagined there would be a point when the club would ask: how much are they improving, are they going to emerge with the amount of quality we need?
Alex Dawson was not the most rounded footballer, but he had been physically awesome as a youth and was someone who fitted perfectly the stereotype of the big, strong striker. In those days, when so many managers picked a team they wondered, ‘Who is going to knock around defenders and score the goals? Who is going to dominate in the air?’ For a while, before he was transferred to Preston North End, big Alex was able to supply the answer.
There were some bleak days indeed and after one game at Burnley, a team of champions brilliantly orchestrated by the great Northern Ireland inside forward Jimmy McIlroy, the ever controversial Bob Lord made a bitter attack on the new United. He said that we had turned into a team of ‘thugs’. The Burnley chairman was no doubt a remarkable character, and unquestionably his club
