I wished some things at the core of George’s life had been different. However, the time for judgement had long passed. When he finally left us, meaning so much to so many people, it was enough to shut your eyes and remember all the best of him – and of that there was so much that went beyond any disputes we might have had about the way a professional footballer should operate for the benefit of both himself and his team. Our relationship had grown warmer in later years, and the pain and frustration of the premature ending of the most beautiful and natural talent I had ever seen was tempered by the fact that we had shared moments that would have brought pride and joy to any footballer who had ever played the game.
To be honest, his first performance for the team, in a league match against West Bromwich at Old Trafford in September 1963, does not linger in my mind. I’m sure he showed some nice touches, but the overall impact was not overwhelming. It was when he returned to the team a few months later, against Burnley at Old Trafford, that you began to see all that he would be. We had been beaten badly at Burnley a few days earlier, and the Old Man was determined to shake up the team. Bringing back the seventeen-year-old George was his boldest stroke and it paid off gloriously. Long before the end, I felt pity for my friend John Angus, the Burnley right back who I had got to know on England duty. John was not so much overwhelmed as tortured. George was like a kid’s dribbling dream that day. The crowd was stunned, then rapturous, and when it was happening I recalled a conversation I had had with one of the coaches at The Cliff training ground a year or so earlier. He had said, ‘We have a lad in the reserves who is bloody good. He’ll be playing alongside you guys soon enough.’ I made the slightly cynical reply, ‘Well, they say that about a lot of young players – let’s wait and see.’ I didn’t watch George play in the reserves, partly because I reckoned that, if he was as good as he was being described, I would be getting a close look at him soon enough. You could see it all in the game against Burnley – the speed, the balance, the nerve, the close control – and the fans loved every second of it. Supporters like nothing better than to see a winger beating a full back to the point of humiliation, and it was a day when they received full value for the price of their tickets.
Going down to London with Denis, I could not help but recall an earlier train journey – one I made with George from Cardiff after we had played in a Uefa representative match, at the time when his reputation – and, much more than that, his celebrity – had reached a peak. This was at the beginning of the phase when the main topic of conversation at Old Trafford often concerned George’s whereabouts the night before – and at roughly what time that night had ended, and in whose company.
Sometimes I would get the story from the horse’s mouth. Training then, for all the growing success of the team, was nothing like so intense as it would be today. Around the little red track at Old Trafford, the players would at first mingle together, do a bit of jogging and then, perhaps after half an hour, the trainers would come out and some more formal work would be done. In the meantime, however, you might have found yourself with a team-mate discussing what they had been up to over the previous few days or, in George’s case, invariably, the nights. Once I said to him, ‘Well, what was the programme last night?’ He told me in some detail. He had been to various bars and clubs, and then finished up in his favourite watering hole, the Brown Bull in Salford. As he related the progress of his night, and I thought of my own life back home in Lymm, I was a little stunned by the comparison and I could not help saying, ‘George, maybe one day they will put you in a bottle in some laboratory at Manchester University.’
On that train journey from Cardiff I remembered that Norma and the girls were away, and I asked George what he was doing that night, imagining that another spectacular tour of Manchester was about to unfold. When he said, ‘Oh, nothing really, maybe I’ll go somewhere for a drink,’ I asked him if he would like to get off the train in Warrington and come to my house for a bit of supper. Norma had told me there was a bag of frozen scampi in the fridge and I had the idea – it turned out to be a little optimistic – that I could make a decent meal out of it for George and me. To be honest, I was a little shocked when George said yes.
It was a strange and in some ways poignant evening. George was very taken with our dog, a Chow, and he was full of questions about how it was being married, about having a dog and domestic life in general. For some reason, I formed the idea that he was intrigued by the possibility of getting married himself, that it might just represent another way of life that could offer him something
