It was one of those little psychological moments that can be so important at a vital stage of a game. My fear was that if I’d kept running, the fan would have kicked the ball away, and with me chasing after it, everybody would have thought we were panicking. It was the last thing we should do. Nobby had convinced us that we could still win.
Three minutes after Sadler’s equaliser, George took the ball down the right side to the dead-ball line. I was running in from behind as he pulled the ball back into the box, and as I looked across I saw a red shirt. My instinct was, ‘This is a chance.’ Then, in a flash, I saw that the person on the end of the pass was not Brian Kidd or David Sadler or John Aston. Of all people, it was Bill Foulkes – the granite man, the rock of the defence, but unquestionably the last man any of us wanted to see running on to a George Best cross twelve minutes from the end of a match that could possibly destroy, one last time, our chances of ever winning the European Cup.
How can I describe one of the most important goals I would ever see? Maybe Bill will settle for ‘exquisite’. Those of us who expected to see the ball balloon high on to the terraces behind the goal were instantly heaped in shame. Not only did Bill Foulkes score, he looked like a striker of the ages, tucking in his shot so easily, so unanswerably, that the goalkeeper Betancort, who had shown brilliant reflexes in the first game at Old Trafford, could scarcely move.
Foulkes was buried in red shirts led by Nobby Stiles.
Later, I was unable to join Norma and my friend, Dave Thomas, the golfer, and his wife, for a dinner of celebration. I couldn’t move from my room because of a bad case of dehydration. The conditions had been so humid, and in those days they didn’t let the players have water. Today’s footballers are overwhelmed with water bottles, but back then you were obliged to carry on and hope you didn’t collapse in extreme conditions. When the final whistle went I fell to the turf. I couldn’t muster the energy to kiss it, but I did think, at a moment I would never forget, ‘It’s ours now. We are going to win the European Cup.’
20
THE EUROPEAN CUP FINAL, 1968
THE CERTAINTY WAS a dangerous feeling, maybe – at least it could have been if at any point before 29 May 1968, at Wembley Stadium I had forgotten one of the first lessons a professional must learn – that you are never going to win a game by right; when you kick off, nothing of the past matters, nothing about reputation – and certainly not just deserts. Still, on the flight back from Madrid I couldn’t get out of my head the idea that the European Cup might well have been sitting next to me. I couldn’t stop thinking, ‘We’ve won it in Madrid – we’ve won it in a place which matters so much to the club and to me.’ I just couldn’t see us losing a European Cup final against Benfica at Wembley – the place where Nobby had jigged so ecstatically when we beat Germany in the World Cup final two years earlier, where I couldn’t hold back the tears when I embraced another team-mate, my brother Jack.
The Old Man’s genius for motivation, his ability to calm or inspire his players in the simplest terms, would surely never operate in more favourable circumstances.
The European Cup, I have always reckoned, was much harder to win than England’s World Cup. The World Cup ran over just four weeks, and we had the advantage of playing all our games at home. It takes effectively two years to win the European Cup and that’s a long time – Manchester United knew better than anybody how hazards can rise up suddenly and strike you down. For Matt Busby, however, the challenge had now reached its easiest point. We were playing on our own soil, and anyone who glanced at our history knew that no club and team ever had greater motivation.
Apart from the memory of Munich, and our duty to those who died there to play to our very limits, there were the semi-final defeats of ’57, ’58 and ’66, against Real Madrid, Milan and Partizan. Added to those focal points was the fact that for some of us this was possibly our last – and certainly our best – chance to win the great trophy.
Bill Foulkes, Shay Brennan – who had returned to the team in Madrid because of worries that Francis Burns might struggle against the guile of Gento – Pat Crerand and I were all approaching that point when we had to wonder how many opportunities were left. It was something I’m sure was also occupying the mind of Denis Law, denied the possibility of a great climactic moment in a brilliant career as he prepared to enter hospital for a vital operation at the age of twenty-eight. If I felt any touch of doubt as we approached the final, I chased it away with the thought, ‘Well, this is it – if we don’t win it this
