Liverpool’s response was to produce one of their trademark performances, full of running and pressure. Ian Callaghan provoked a brilliant save from Alex Stepney. Then Ian St John flattened Stepney in a collision on the line. Tommy Smith was coming into his prime, tackling and moving forward quite ferociously in following Shankly’s version of the instructions Jimmy Murphy always used to hammer into my ears. For Tommy, the advice was always the same: make your presence felt, show them you’re on the field. Translation: establish physical and psychological dominance from the word go.
The Old Man had told us that he saw this as a classic test of our determination to inject into our game a little of the steel that he believed had become such a vital factor in the game, both in England and in Europe – something we may have lacked to a crucial degree when sliding out of the European Cup in Belgrade the previous year. He was not disappointed. Stepney was defiant on his line and the back four of Tony Dunne, Bill Foulkes, Nobby Stiles and Bobby Noble seemed capable of mopping up the pressure until midnight.
Everyone agreed that the goalless draw was our moral victory. We had proved that we could slug it out in the trenches as well as score pretty goals, and there was a lot of satisfaction on the team bus rolling home down the East Lancashire Road. It is the way of football to celebrate great victories, to make them the milestones of any career, but sometimes a deeper pride comes from knowing that you have come up with a result under the heaviest pressure. It strengthens you in a way that is never true of a flurry of goals against opposition which, deep down, you know has been wanting in some vital area of the game.
Though I had been as unable to provide a cutting edge of counter-attack as either Denis Law or George Best, I still felt this had been a good and significant day. We had achieved our basic ambition of frustrating a Liverpool we knew would attack us from the first whistle, and both Matt Busby and Jimmy Murphy seemed pleased with the level of effort. Jimmy had passed on his usual insight that footballers never suffered heart attacks because of hard work and he was quick to say that we had shown enough energy – and spirit. There had been some evidence of the mettle of champions.
It was a theory confirmed in the penultimate match of the season at Upton Park, where we completed our twentieth unbeaten league game with a 6–1 trouncing of West Ham. My World Cup team-mates Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters suffered as painfully as Gordon Banks had at Old Trafford, but once again one of our most extravagant attacking performances was achieved under a shadow; in fact at the end of this occasion, after goals from George Best, Denis Law (2), Paddy Crerand, Bill Foulkes and me, there were two reasons for gloom working against the elation we felt at landing another title.
At the end of the match there was fighting on the terraces, some of the worst, it was said, ever seen in an English football ground, and though the disease of football hooliganism was still in its teething stages, there had been earlier evidence that the days when a man could take his family to a game without danger might be on the point of disappearing. It was depressing to think that the times Jack and I had enjoyed so much at St James’ Park and Roker Park might soon belong to another, all but forgotten culture. Hooliganism is a threat which has come and gone and then returned down the years since then, but if there is one common duty for all in football it is to be vigilant in a way that perhaps none of us were when the problem first began to take deep root in the sixties.
The other reason for sadness was the absence of Bobby Noble, who at twenty-one had been playing so well that he had kept my friend Shay Brennan out of the side. Bobby, a Stockport lad, was not the most elegant full back you ever saw, and there were also stories that off the field and away from the club he liked a good time, but he had all the qualities of a great defender. He was especially suited to meet the new demand of Matt Busby for a United who defended and tackled as hard as it attacked elegantly. Two weeks before the decisive performance at West Ham, Bobby had been involved in a car crash while driving home after a game with Sunderland. Like David Herd, he insisted he would win back his place, but when he came back to work he made a shocking discovery. His head and chest injuries had taken away his natural understanding of how to play the game.
There had been other prices to pay for the championship win which Matt Busby had made such a priority. However, when you considered how cruelly David Herd and Bobby Noble had been cut down, a 5–1 League Cup defeat by Blackpool, and Norwich City’s 2–1 fourth round FA Cup win before a huge crowd at Old Trafford, didn’t seem quite so disastrous. As it turned out, in fact, these slip-ups almost seemed pre-ordained, as though for us there could be only
