No doubt another contribution to the situation was John Connelly’s origins. A native of the rugby league stronghold of St Helens, as a footballer he grew up in Burnley, winning a league title for the town which was so clannish I sometimes thought it might declare a republic at any time. The Burnley lads always stuck together. I remember when Old England used to play against Young England before the FA Cup final, the Turf Moor contingent would always form their own table: John Connelly, Gordon Harris, Ray Pointer and John Angus. They peered out at the rest of the world quite suspiciously, as though they felt that if they kept together, they could hold off all comers, and for a few years they did so quite brilliantly. In those days no team in the land went to Turf Moor, set in a bowl of the moors, with easy hearts.
Whenever I’m in East Lancashire I try to visit John. Until recently that usually meant calling into the fish shop he ran in Brierfield. It was called Connelly’s Plaice, and he never apologised for that. As a magistrate, he was not afraid of administrating tough justice, and he would tell me how some of his regulars would come in and complain if they had been up in court and John and his colleagues had found them guilty and given them a stiff fine. But it never seemed to affect his popularity in the area. He was known for what he was at Old Trafford: a tough professional who always came to work with the most serious intent.
It was the same with David Herd, another who, while being a bit of a loner and never drawing too much attention to himself, was a key reason why United emerged so strongly in the mid-sixties. His father Alex was a star of Manchester City in the thirties, a family story that had an extraordinary chapter when they both played for Stockport County, one on his way out of football as the other was coming in. When he came to us from Arsenal he immediately joined up with Nobby, Shay and me in the group he christened the Big Four.
Mostly we played cards in a non-serious way, usually Kings or cribbage. We were never mistaken for high rollers on our way to Las Vegas. Nobby and David were most handicapped. It was during one of our sessions that Harry Gregg observed that Nobby’s eyesight was so bad he could scarcely see the cards. It was only when Harry reported this to Matt Busby that Nobby went to a specialist and was given contact lenses – maybe one of the most significant moments in a career which would turn out so brilliantly after some years of struggling to establish himself in a regular position.
David’s problem was that, despite all his enthusiasm, he couldn’t play cards. He was perhaps the worst cards player I had ever seen. What he could do so much better, however, was lead an attack with speed and power and a withering shot.
Law and Herd complemented each other superbly, a fact which is illustrated perfectly by the latter’s productivity in the four seasons that followed his two-goal contribution to the cup victory in 1963. In those seasons we won two titles and finished runners-up once, and Herd’s efforts were utterly vital. In the first campaign, when Law was at times unplayable and scored a stunning total of 46 goals in all competitions, Herd, while playing nineteen games fewer, found the net 27 times. In 1964–65, Denis scored 39, David 28. The following season saw Herd overtake Denis, who, while playing three games fewer, had 24 goals against Herd’s 32. In the second title year, Law was back in front with 25 goals against 18, but he played in seven games more. In other circumstances, in less glamorous company, David Herd would surely have become something of a folk hero, a component of a famous partnership.
David’s fate, though, was not to be one of the fabled heroes of football. He did his job brilliantly, but he was almost destined to operate in someone else’s shadow. He often bore the brunt of criticism from the terraces when things didn’t go so well, a result, maybe, of all the praise that lapped around three of his team-mates, but it never seemed to take any edge off his determination. He was always the same: as eager to play cards as badly as he was to score goals so regularly and so well.
The power of his shot was the most amazing aspect of his talent. He was particularly ferocious during the warm-up. His shots would threaten the health of the goalkeeper, and sometimes injured hapless fans cowering behind the little wooden fence behind the goal. Once, he was so keen to play that, in his enthusiasm, he injured himself before a game. Mostly, though, he was strong and selfless and, like John Connelly, one of those players destined to impress no one so much as his fellow professionals, who could see during a match what the fans on the terraces might miss: the level of effort and the technical scoring ability. There’s a thin line between a performance which looks exceptional but which is actually down to a kindly run of the ball and one which demonstrates true technique. Sometimes you need to share the pitch to appreciate that.
Our success in the cup and then the league brought back the component that I had missed so acutely in the battle to recover from Munich: a return to the European theatre. We had built ourselves back into the upper echelons of English football, but the great lure was still those foreign fields where it was as important as ever for us to make our mark.
When Bill Shankly opened the gates to Europe for Liverpool for the first
