Though we were never close in a day-by-day, personal way, and our lives rarely intertwined beyond the affairs of the football club, we knew how each of us contributed to the rise of the team, and I know, when everything else was set aside, we gloried in our ability to make exciting and, quite often, beautiful football. That was our pride. Our good luck was to be thrown together, and this was the mark of Matt Busby’s genius in grasping the chemistry of the game: how different characters and types of talent could meld so well that, at the very best of times, they became one. Denis would always be a loner to quite a sharp degree, the maverick Scot making his own sense of all that he found before him, and George, of course, went his own way so often when the training was done – with or without his involvement – in the later stages of his time at Old Trafford. It is the way things are, I imagine, in any dressing room or company of men when great deeds are achieved: individual strengths and weaknesses are absorbed, and compensated for, in the growth of a winning team.
I will always be proud to have been part of the Big Three, to have my name linked forever with George and Denis, and that was the overwhelming feeling I know Denis and I shared when we all came together one last time in the hospital room in London shortly before George died at the end of 2005.
But before the Big Three attracted so much of the attention and the glory in the third coming of Busby’s United, there was the Big Four – the rather ironic title Shay Brennan, David Herd, Nobby Stiles and I applied to our dressing-room alliance in those formative years of a new and all-conquering team. At the start there were just the three of us: Shay, always amiable and mischievous and carefree; David, the new signing from Arsenal; and me. We drifted together quite naturally, played cards, went to the pictures and for a while I used to go to the dogs at Belle Vue with Shay.
I was never really interested in the dog racing itself, but I enjoyed Shay’s company, you could have a good meal at the track, and I found it remarkable that it didn’t seem to matter to him whether he won or lost. He was drawn to the excitement and the uncertainty, and when he lost he simply shrugged his shoulders. I remember being in the dressing room one morning when someone said that Shay had taken a big loss at the dogs – it was when my attendance had fallen, partly because of failing interest and, probably more importantly, because it cut across the demands of my new married life. The word was that Shay had lost £200 – or roughly a month’s wages. I was both concerned and fascinated to see how he would be. In fact he was exactly the same as always. He made a few jokes as he changed for training. He was happy-go-lucky, at least on the surface, in a way that I could never be. In earlier times I would arrange to meet him in town after a match on Saturday. The meeting place was the public library in the centre of town, near to a little cinema we used to go to after a beer or two. Sometimes, though, he would be an hour late and I would be fuming. ‘Where the hell do you think you’ve been?’ I would ask him. ‘I’ve been standing here for an hour, wasting my life away.’ He would just make a joke of it and say, ‘Bobby, why get yourself worked up?’ Sometimes, usually after he had made me laugh, I would say, ‘Well, I wish I could be like you.’
Nobby Stiles was a late entry into the Big Four. He was very close to John Giles, whose sister Kay he would marry, and when John made his rebellion against Matt Busby, arguing that we were badly treated after our FA Cup win when we received a bonus of just £20, and was promptly sold to Leeds United, Nobby seemed to be a little lost.
We invited him to the pictures and he seemed happy to accept – in fact he stayed with us for ever. We called him Happy because he was always moaning. I soon came to love Nobby, and that feeling has never lost its strength down the years. I make no apology for claiming that he was a great player. He had a reputation for being rough and tough, a kicker, but that assessment only ran along the surface of his ability. Nobby Stiles did things for United, and England, that no one else could have done.
At United, as it would be with England, an entire team was in his debt. He would make his name marking Eusebio on behalf of England, but that was the most visible and obvious point of his brilliance. There was so much else. In the dressing room, on the team bus or in a hotel, he could cause mayhem with his clumsiness, but on the field he saw every threat to our defence.
No doubt he would have made his way in the game anyway, as a midfielder of fierce tackling and aggression and great vision. However, it was more evidence of the brilliance of the Busby–Murphy reading of potential that it included the picture of Stiles the terrier and big Bill Foulkes fusing together so well in the centre of the defence that they might have been just one set of defensive reflexes.
Nobby read the game as though he was equipped with radar, and if I will always feel the greatest pride that I played in the company of George and Denis, the same is equally true of Nobby Stiles. He was the often unsung
