The third game was made to look one-sided, but at least half of it wasn’t. It required us to drive ourselves forward as we had never done before – and would rarely be asked to again.
Looking back, the semi-final defeat which then came to us against West Ham – a team we had beaten 2–0 on their own ground a week earlier – was not such a disgrace. Bobby Moore had one of his best ever club games, and when we called on the last of our reserves – one step from a return to Wembley – we found they had gone. They had been drawn out of us by Sunderland three times in nine days, and when we travelled to Hillsborough it was to try to cross a bridge too far. However, I would never believe all that effort had been misspent.
19
THE FOOTBALL TRIP OF OUR LIVES
ONE DAY RECENTLY I was sitting alone in the Old Trafford stands, facing the Stretford End and taking in the sweep of the empty, beautifully manicured green field as I thought of the old days and old games. Suddenly a burst of action flared in my mind’s eye: light summer rain was falling as Denis Law won the ball at the goal-line to the left of the near posts and made off irresistibly down the left side. When the full back, Tottenham’s Joe Kinnear, came to challenge, Denis went by him as though he didn’t exist.
It had been wonderful and unforgettable to see. I had been out on the left, but moved inside to create the space that would accommodate Denis’s run. Brian Kidd, who at eighteen was making a statement of talent that might rush him to glory at an age when I had still been fretting over my chances of getting to play just one game at the highest level, had already announced an easy ability to slip his marker, and he did this again, perfectly, before inviting a pass. Denis laid the ball into Kidd, who quickly rolled it across the front of the eighteen-yard line and into my path. The shot swirled past Pat Jennings, one of the greatest goalkeepers of all time.
The movement had lasted no more than five or six seconds. I had made my run without ever being near the ball. The Spurs defence, which was also manned by players of the quality of Dave Mackay, Mike England and Cyril Knowles, had not come near to closing the hole made for me by Denis Law’s charge and the movement of young Kidd.
It was a lovely moment – and an encouraging signal in a Charity Shield game that introduced the season of 1967–68 which, whatever else it produced, required us to win the European Cup.
In one way, though, the passage of play which was so thrilling to be part of, and which I have always been able to recall so vividly that it might have happened yesterday, was something of an illusion in what it said about the future of Denis Law. For three seasons largely free of injuries he had been unstoppable, and now it seemed, when maybe it would matter more than ever before, he was still in the richest vein of his career. Unfortunately, however, the sweet and biting simplicity of Denis’s impact on that game against Spurs became progressively elusive through the season, initially through disciplinary problems – he missed nine matches after a fight with Arsenal’s Ian Ure, a climax to some volatile reactions to heavy tackling which had plunged him into controversy when an opponent’s jaw was broken in a flare-up on the summer tour of Australia – and then, more seriously, through injury.
He would play just three games in our European Cup campaign, and two of them were in the formal business of the tie with the part-timers of Hibernians of Malta. By the end of the season, Denis would be in a hospital bed after a knee operation.
There would be other disappointments. We were ejected from the FA Cup in the third round, losing by the only goal, which came fourteen minutes into extra time of a replay against Spurs at White Hart Lane. Also, in a tremendous race, we let go of our title on the last day, losing 2–1 to fifteenth-placed Sunderland while Manchester City, having won at Tottenham a few days earlier, claimed the championship in a thrilling 4–3 win at Newcastle. It didn’t help that City’s Malcolm Allison’s after-match reaction was less than modest. He said, ‘Next stop Mars?’
We, however, still had to face our most pressing reality. Our next stop was in Madrid, at the Bernabeu, for the second leg of the European Cup semi-final. It was not inter-planetary travel, just the most important football trip of our lives.
Little or nothing in the campaign had proved easy – even the Maltese had held us to a goalless draw on their flinty pitch – but the harder it got, the more determined we became. Losing the cup was unfortunate, mislaying the title careless, but no one wanted to consider the possibility of surrender in Europe.
In the second round in Bosnia, Sarajevo tested our resolve in the only way they could. They were a team of limited ability, but, like most Balkan sides, they lacked nothing in resolve – or physical ruthlessness. The tackles were flying in, sometimes thigh high, and Alex Stepney did well to stop a shot from the striker Musemic on the line. It was a small miracle that the only casualty was the Sarajevo winger Prodanovic. He left after half an hour.
Stepney’s goal was besieged in the second half but the defence – the polished young Scot Francis Burns (keeping Shay Brennan out of the team) and David Sadler (replacing the injured Nobby Stiles) – made the vital tackles and held their nerve. John Fitzpatrick, whose career would end
