We were progressing at pace, with a growing swell of opportunities coming our way, although we failed to take advantage of them all. West Ham United, then Leeds, running and tackling endlessly in their promotion year, beat us in the FA Cup semi-finals of 1964 and 1965, and there was crushing disappointment when we failed, in ’64, to exploit the 1963 cup final win over Leicester which returned us, a little too nonchalantly in the end, to Europe in the Cup-Winners’ Cup.
At first things went well. We drew and then won in the legs against Willem II. Then Tottenham, defending their crown, were swept aside 4–1 at Old Trafford after beating us 2–0 in the first leg of the quarter-final at White Hart Lane. Spurs suffered a terrible blow when Dave Mackay broke his leg after colliding with Noel Cantwell, but then we lost Maurice Setters for some time with a head wound. Danny Blanchflower had gone, but Spurs were still full of quality with men like John White, Cliff Jones and Jimmy Greaves. David Herd scored the goals that drew us level on aggregate and though Greaves pushed Tottenham into the lead again, I was able to respond with two goals in the last ten minutes. I had the feeling that we would soon have our hands on a piece of European silverware – not the one we craved, the European Cup itself, but something to announce that we were winning again on the foreign ground we once pioneered.
However, in Lisbon, just a few miles down the road from the Estadio da Luz where George would change the scale of his career and his life in another two years, Sporting Lisbon ambushed us at the Alvalade Stadium. George scarcely got a kick. Nor did the rest of us. Sporting, trailing 4–1 from the first leg, beat us 5–0. No one could look back on this night with any satisfaction, and least of all poor Maurice Setters. After the game he stumbled on the marble floor of our hotel lobby in Estoril and injured his knee.
This left the door open for Nobby Stiles, who for so long had been in search of a settled first-team place. The Old Man received a word in his ear from Jimmy Murphy: Norrie, as the Old Man always called Nobby, was perfectly equipped to replace Maurice alongside Bill Foulkes, and make the position his own. It meant that Nobby’s professional life had – for him just as profoundly as George’s would also do – changed in Lisbon. He was not destined to be a star of the discos or the boutiques, but he would make his name as an English folk hero. As so often in football, a mishap for one player makes the future of a team-mate. The door opened for Stiles – and he went through and closed it behind him more smoothly, more emphatically, than he would ever do anything else in his life.
I have already expressed my love for Nobby, my admiration for him as a man and a competitor, but maybe it is time to give some of the flavour of what he brought to us on a permanent basis, something beyond his almost psychic reading of an opposing team. He made me laugh so hard that the tears ran down my face, and the sportswriter Hugh McIlvanney once wrote that compared to Nobby, Inspector Clouseau was ‘blessedly adroit’. No one could accuse him of over-statement.
Nobby didn’t say good morning. Instead, he always reported a catastrophe. A typical offering was: ‘You’ll never guess what I did this morning, Bob …’ I would agree, and then he would say something like, ‘I pulled the garage door off.’ We heard that one on more than one occasion.
He excelled himself when we arrived in Australia after a long flight which had made several stops. For the trip I had borrowed an expensive camera, which I had put in one bag, and in another I’d placed some duty-free items, including a bottle of brandy I had bought on the way out from England. At Sydney airport, I asked Nobby to look after the bags while I went off to the duty free shop. When I got back there was only one bag, and it didn’t look right. It wasn’t. The brandy bottle was broken and the camera was floating. Nobby was quite agitated. He said, ‘It’s your bloody fault. You shouldn’t have left them with me.’ I said, ‘Fair enough Nobby, but just out of interest, could you tell me, please, what happened?’
Nobby said he had thought it stupid that I had a small amount of stuff in two bags. Why not put all the items into one bag? Of course it made perfect sense – right up to the point that Nobby smashed the bag against a chair.
Another time, he described one memorable scene in Market Street, a main thoroughfare of Manchester, as if he was a pure victim. ‘Some silly bugger banged into the back of my car,’ he reported. Of course he leaped out, but the other driver pointed at Nobby’s bumper and said, ‘Look, I don’t think I’ve done too much damage.’ They both bent down at the same time to inspect the bumper – and they nutted each other. Apparently a large crowd gathered.
When he moved to Middlesbrough, I was able to follow the trail of disaster whenever he appeared on television. A plaster on his neck told me he
