Because I shared a room with Nobby from time to time, with both United and England, the law of averages said that I would have the best story, and the truth is that the airport performance was really a relatively minor example of his destructive potential. Far more extraordinary was his performance one morning when we were returning from England duty in London. We were sharing a room in a hotel near Euston station and had slept quite late. When I awoke I realised we had scarcely an hour to get on the train. I didn’t need to shave so I was quickly into my clothes. To help with the job of rousing Nobby, I switched on a little radio attached to the bedroom wall.
As he got out of bed he said we needed some light and walked over to the window to draw the curtains. When he tugged them they fell to the floor. He then complained about the noise of the radio and reached to switch it off. On cue, it fell off the wall. Then he went to the washbasin. He collided with the glass shelf where you put your shaving gear and soap. Everything fell down. All this action was compressed into no more than five minutes. It remains a mystery how Nobby was able to make the short journey to the station without the help of an ambulance crew.
On that flight down to Australia he reported that he had quite a number of relatives there. However, he was going to avoid them. His theory was that they must have been in a huff when they decided to emigrate. Yet one morning in Brisbane I walked into the hotel lobby only to see Nobby in the middle of a great crowd of people. They all wanted to know how it was back in Manchester – and particularly in their part of it, Collyhurst. They were all relatives.
Uncannily, when Nobby went out to the field he became one of the most business-like footballers I would ever see. His timing and sense of space and movement were simply phenomenal, something which you couldn’t help but reflect upon when sometimes, after a game, you had to get down on your hands and knees to help him find a lost contact lens. Once, he had to implore the head groundsman to keep on the floodlights. He desperately needed to see a glint in the grass.
With Nobby such a force, both as a lynchpin in defence and a character in the dressing room, and with the sense of a team growing so steadily, the title wins of 1965 and 1967 were surely the signal that the European drought would end soon enough. It was an intoxicating thought, but there was more frustration of the kind that had come to us in the game against Sporting Lisbon in 1964.
The following season we were knocked out of the Inter Cities Fairs Cup by Hungarian club Ferencváros in a semi-final play-off, but that disappointment was nothing compared to the blow that hit us at Old Trafford a year later – we had been convinced that 1966 was the year we were supposed to win the big one. We had thought that it had been written in the sky above the Estadio da Luz when we thrashed Benfica in the quarter-final, when the Portuguese team, who had never been beaten at home in the European Cup they had won twice, presented the European Player of the Year trophy to the great Eusebio.
Benfica had bristled with confidence despite their 3–2 loss in the first leg. Estadio da Luz, after all, was a fortress: in nineteen previous European Cup ties at the ground they had won eighteen and drawn one, scoring seventy-eight goals in the process. They had appeared in four of the five previous European Cup finals. A tremendous roar greeted the first whistle. From that moment it was George Best’s game, football history will always be sure about that, but in fact the whole team functioned beautifully.
More than forty years later, soon after George’s death, Denis Law and I spent a nostalgic morning together at The Cliff training ground. We communed with the ghosts of the past and, as you sometimes do on such occasions, we considered when our old team hit its highest level of performance. When did everything fit together most perfectly? When did we understand most completely what each of us was about? We agreed very quickly it was that night in Lisbon when we tore Benfica apart. Georgie ran riot, but then so did the team. Every pass seemed to find its target. Every run seemed to have a point. We were unstoppable – and surely we would remain so in the semi-finals against Partizan Belgrade?
Of course it would have been impossible to come up with a match that carried any heavier load of emotion. For Matt Busby, Harry Gregg, Bill Foulkes and me going back to Belgrade was like retracing footsteps that never ceased to haunt us. In footballing terms Partizan were not so special, certainly not as good as the team we had come so close to dismantling on that frozen pitch in the first half of our last game before Munich, but we were caught in a strange, almost eerie listlessness. There was also the problem of George Best. The destroyer of Benfica had picked up a cartilage injury in an FA Cup match against Preston, but the Old Man, conscious of the mystique that George had created in Lisbon, asked him to go into the game with his knee strapped. However, when Best missed an early chance that in Lisbon
