For Matt Busby, as his eyes turned to Europe again, there was one great encouragement. He had reason to believe once more that his team, despite the setbacks, had shown a capacity to grow stronger after the kind of disappointment which had threatened to be so crushing in Belgrade. The suspicion then was that something as vital as reasonable hope had died in the Old Man that gut-wrenching night in Serbia, but such fears had surely been banished in the campaign which followed, before the final break-out at Upton Park – the classic pattern of winning at home and drawing away.
This is something that doesn’t just sprout overnight. It is a collective understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of team-mates, a willingness to fight, to grow strong at the points of vulnerability. There had been plenty of those down the years, not least in the run of semi-final defeats, but there was also a sense that we could come back with our self-belief undamaged.
It was certainly a satisfying time for me to reflect on the course of my career. I would be thirty in a few months and though my enthusiasm for the game was as strong as ever – as were my ambitions – I already had plenty of reasons to be grateful for all the circumstances that had drawn me to United and their special vision on how the game should be played.
I had been part of three championship-winning teams, won one and lost two FA Cup finals, plus played in more semi-finals than I cared to recall, and had reached two European Cup semi-finals. I had also just been voted European Player of the Year, a great honour but one which I also accepted on behalf of the England team who had won the World Cup and a Manchester United team which had once again proved that it was still a major force in the game.
It meant that with the Old Man and Bill Foulkes, the only other survivor of Munich still playing in the team, I was left with just one unfulfilled goal. We had to make another run at the European Cup, we had to put right the losses against AC Milan, Real Madrid and Partizan at the last but one hurdle – and we had to make good on that promise we had all made to ourselves at various stages of our recovery from the air crash.
Ten years on, which if we could do it was not so long down the road of a football club, we had to make a proper monument for the men who died in Munich.
In the summer of 1967, we had reason to believe that the coming season might just see the completion of five years of growth which, taken overall, was not so difficult to measure. At Wembley in 1963 some of the chemistry had been in place; now, two titles and a near miss in Europe later, we could look back on some great days – and great matches – with considerable pride. There was a bit more fibre – and maybe devil – about Manchester United. We could see where the doubts had been engaged and countered and where, after some failure, we had made our strongest efforts to reassert our status as a leading team.
Many would have chosen the eruption at the Estadio da Luz as the most compelling evidence that we were indeed able to compete again at the highest level, but in the matter of forging the team’s spirit my favourite example was not one match but three. All of them were against Sunderland, who, though it was hard to believe for much of the time, were still a Second Division team in 1964. That status, though, was obviously a temporary condition when we drew them in the quarter-final of the 1963–64 FA Cup. Under their tough and experienced manager Alan Brown – who had earlier built a reputation for iron discipline in shaping Burnley into a major force in the land – Sunderland had invested heavily in young players and were moving back to what they believed was a right dictated by their history: a return to the First Division which had been their constant home from the nineteenth century until they were relegated in 1958.
Sunderland won the league title six times before they were relegated. Now, everything about them, and not least the fervour of their vast support, said they were impatient to be back where they belonged. All three games, I believe, pushed forward the understanding of football in all those who saw them – and in all those who played.
Brown was fighting out the Second Division champion ship with Leeds United’s Don Revie, and there wasn’t a hint of an inferiority complex about Sunderland when they came at us so strongly at Old Trafford. Their confidence was well founded. They moved the ball with conviction, and when they ran into forward positions they did it with a bright optimism. They had strength in all areas of the team. Jimmy Montgomery, as he would prove so spectacularly nearly a decade later, when he defied a then mighty Leeds United in the 1973 cup final, was a goalkeeper of both nerve and great agility. In the middle of their defence, they had a glamorous giant, the handsome, elegant Irishman Charlie Hurley, who even in the Second Division was said to be one of the country’s best-paid players. He had both talent and aura, and in Sunderland was nothing less than a cult figure. Nick Sharkey, a product of a good youth system, was building a reputation as a striker; another Irishman, Johnny Crossan, was recognised as one of the most skilful players in the game, and out on the left George Mulhall was a winger of craft who had been capped by Scotland.
This was a team who were right to believe they could offer more than hope and speculation, and just before, and after,
