In the first half, despite the quality of the opposition, we had probably assumed that our firepower, which had carried us through a crisis at Southampton in the third round, then swept us by Bristol Rovers and Barnsley, would again be the decisive factor. The result was a performance which was not as disciplined as it should have been in defence and we paid again, just five minutes after Hurley’s own goal, when Shay Brennan fouled Crossan and then had to watch him score the penalty. With four minutes to go, we were still 3–1 down and you could sense the resignation seeping from the Old Trafford terraces. But this, we seemed to be saying, just wouldn’t do. We raised ourselves for one last push and in the 87th minute I did something rather extraordinary. I went in for a corner and headed it home. We won the ball at the restart and swept down on Montgomery again, this time with George Best finishing the move for 3–3.
Four days later the battle was resumed at Roker Park in circumstances that would prove quite unforgettable. If anyone had ever doubted the passions that football could release in my corner of the country, they needed to be in the little streets around the old stadium. The official gate figure was 46,727, but gates were knocked down and some estimates had the crowd as high as 90,000 – with another thousand, finally, locked out.
Sunderland didn’t have a ticket system and it was a case of first come, first served. As we travelled from our hotel to the stadium, it seemed as though the whole world wanted to see the game. Apart from local pride, it also said something about the rise of Manchester United back to some of the old levels of appeal first created by the lovely football produced by the team of 1948. It took the team bus an hour to inch round from one side of the ground to the other.
Again the pressure was immense out on the field – and again we struggled to stay in the tie. Nick Sharkey scored five minutes before half time and it took us half an hour to equalise, Denis Law winning a vital half yard against a defence which until then hadn’t offered an inch. The noise generated by all those fans crammed into the dark, and what must have been extremely dangerous, terraces was amazing. It was though we were playing beyond ourselves, carried on by the fervour of the crowd and an unwillingness, after so much effort, to abandon the fight.
Extra time was inevitable – and yet another ordeal for us. In the first minute, Maurice Setters lost control of the ball in the rain and it squirted past Dave Gaskell. With two minutes to go, we were heading out of the cup we had won so convincingly less than a year before. Then, as Sunderland was building to a roar that would surely have swept down across the River Wear and along the coastline, I repeated my unlikely deed of the first game. I headed another equaliser. The ball came to me in the air in the box, but I cannot say it was a particularly assured nod of my head. The ball went in a slow arc over the line, with just the tips of Jimmy Montgomery’s fingers away from stopping it.
In the second replay at Huddersfield, before 54,952 ticket-holding fans, Nick Sharkey again put Sunderland in the lead, two minutes after half time. However, this time there was a factor beyond the discipline and the work ethic the old general Alan Brown had injected into his team. Denis Law, returning to the ground where he had first beguiled Bill Shankly, announced he was in a familiar place and was taking charge. No one could do that more imperiously, and his first goal came a minute after Sharkey’s. His hat-trick was completed in the 61st minute. Phil Chisnall interjected with one goal and David Herd made it 5–1.
Sunderland deserved better than that score-line after putting so much effort – and skill – into the three games, but they would have some reward when, after so spectacularly signalling their intentions to return to the top flight, they fought on and shared promotion to the First Division with Leeds a few weeks later.
For us what came after was only anti-climax: a 3–1 defeat by West Ham down the road in Hillsborough, and second place to Liverpool in the league. But then maybe sometimes there are other measurements to be made: when the team bus pulled away from the Leeds Road stadium, the arena Denis Law had reclaimed so brilliantly and where, after the fight of our lives, we had finally come out on top, I said to myself, ‘Well, if you ever wanted to watch football, or play football, it could never get better than this. I will never forget these three games.’ That still holds as true today as when the final whistle came on that muddy field in Yorkshire.
I remember the matches quite separately and for different reasons. The first one carried the shock of struggling to compete with a second divison team, even though it was one of obvious talent and managed by one of the early pioneers of modern, organised football. Brown was a difficult, often inaccessible man, but he imposed standards and won many admirers, not least another coaching revolutionary, Malcolm Allison, who produced a wonderfully dynamic Manchester City team.
The second game at Roker distilled everything I believed was true about the potential of football to
