I discovered that the night offered one last threat to some peaceful sleep when I finally went to my hotel room, warm at last, in the early hours of the morning. Almost immediately, the phone rang. It was my friend and accountant, Reuben Kay, who had joined us on the trip. His voice was agitated when he told me, ‘Bobby, somebody’s after me. My phone keeps ringing and when I pick it up someone keeps saying, Comrade Ten, Comrade Ten.’ I went to Reuben’s room, calmed him down a little and took him to the reception desk in the hotel. It didn’t take long to identify the problem. The culprit was someone seeking George Best’s autograph. He had got hold of the wrong room number.
It was a small reminder of how football, back when the Berlin Wall seemed like a permanent statement about the divisions of Europe and the world, had the power to draw people together, however confusingly at times. Recently, when a Russian intelligence man was poisoned in London, I was reminded of Reuben’s anxiety in the small hours of the Polish night – and also of another curious affair that came at around that time, after the BBC rang me up one day to say that one of their Russian correspondents was anxious to meet me. They wondered if I could give him a few hours of my time. I said that I was going to watch a match at Burnley that night; if he cared to catch a plane, I would pick him up at the airport and take him to Turf Moor. We could talk on the journey and at the match.
When his interviewing was done, the Russian said, ‘I know you’re going to see your friend, the great goalkeeper Lev Yashin in Moscow when you play in his testimonial match, and I wonder if you could give him a present from me?’ It seemed a little odd, but when I agreed he handed me a pen. I never knew a pen could be so heavy, and I thought to myself, ‘Well, what am I going to do now?’ I didn’t want to make any kind of fuss; Lev was a personal friend and I worried that I might cause him some embarrassment in those Cold War days by going to the police with this strange object. So I took the ‘pen’ to Moscow, though not without a twinge of misgiving, and duly presented it to the great man. It was curious that when I explained it came from a Russian BBC man in London, he didn’t say a word, just slipped it into his pocket, almost as though it was something he had expected. But from whom? Could it possibly have been M?
Unlike Frank McGhee of the Daily Mirror, however, I had no yearnings for a career in espionage, a fact which struck me again on another visit to Moscow. I received a call from a Russian, who said, ‘My friends and I want to arrange a meeting with you.’ I told him that, as he knew where I was staying, he should come down to my hotel. ‘Oh, no,’ he replied. ‘We want to see you outside the Bolshoi Ballet.’ I declined, quite sensibly I think.
For some time playing football in Eastern Europe had been both an adventure and a mystery. Moscow, Belgrade, Budapest, Prague, Warsaw, they were fascinating places if you wanted to venture, however carefully, into another world. My charming and somewhat eccentric friend, Geoffrey Green of The Times, perhaps did it with less care than most of his colleagues or the players of Manchester United and England. Sometimes he arrived at an airport, almost invariably dressed in his Russian old leather coat, carrying not much more than his prized banjo. Once, though, he took this to the extreme when he arrived in Budapest without a passport. The Hungarian officials were aghast that someone in those days had expected to walk into their tightly secured country without even a slip of paper to say who he was. Of course, he was the talk of the airport bus that back then would carry both the players and those who wrote about them – but one of his colleagues, who was at the time muttering that this was so typical of Geoffrey, was soon quite shocked when he looked out of the window. There, flying past us, was a government limousine – with the football correspondent of The Times sitting serenely in the back seat.
Geoffrey Green was one of those characters who bring a little spice to life. For someone like me, who always, whether successfully or not, tried to do what I thought was expected of me, he was operating on a rather different planet. He went his own way, in his own style, but one of the things I always liked about him was his obvious passion for football. It showed in his beautiful writing and conversation, which might occasionally be quirky but was always filled with warmth and humour.
Once, on a long flight from South America, I wandered to the back of the plane in search of a cup of tea. As was often the case, my team-mates were sleeping while I fidgeted in my seat, bored or a little tense depending on my mood and the quality of the flight. Geoffrey was in the galley and he wasn’t drinking tea. He was sipping a whisky and was plainly in a very good mood. ‘Bobby,’ he said, ‘can you believe I’m sixty and my young wife is going to give me
