Certainly I was pretty sure how I would feel in the morning. We had done something that ninety-nine per cent of players could only fantasise about. It was the last chapter of an amazing story and one I knew, in my thirty-first year, would never be surpassed in my playing career.
People still ask me what the dominant feeling was when I travelled to our West End hotel from Wembley Stadium. Honestly, it was more than anything complete exhaustion, but maybe that is only part of the truth. Maybe deep down there was that other sense, one that said that even if we hadn’t drawn a line under the past, in some ways closed the door on it – which of course could never be done completely – at least something important had indeed changed. Perhaps it allowed us, finally, to think that in the future, however much of it was left to us as players contending for the great trophies, we were now responsible for ourselves and not those we’d so tragically left behind.
Nobby and I missed the great homecoming, the scenes of joy in Albert Square, Manchester, in front of the town hall. We had to report for England, which, speaking for myself, was in some ways a relief.
Just as I had been relieved after Munich that I did not have to experience the ordeal of the funerals, of saying farewell to so many friends in public and in a state of mind where I couldn’t really begin to trust my emotions, maybe there was an echo of that when Nobby and I said farewell to our United team-mates and told them to give our regards to our happy old town. The guts of the story had been played out.
Certainly the feeling of satisfaction had indeed come with the dawn, and the knowledge that we had accomplished our mission and it was all that I had hoped it would be. If I stripped away all the history, the special circumstances that had been rooted in my thoughts for so long, I was still left with something that any professional would treasure for the rest of his days. Eleven years after that first collision with the great Real Madrid, I was a champion of Europe.
The great thing was that we had got there after all those disappointments. All those anguished thoughts about what might have happened if, say, two years earlier the Partizan goalkeeper had not made that great save from Denis Law, could be put away once and for all time. We had done the job that had been asked of us, and that we had demanded from ourselves, and now we had to move to another phase of our football lives. That it would prove to be something far from what we might have hoped when the champagne corks popped in the Russell Hotel was something we coped with on some days better than others.
However, running through every game I played, every choked-back bout of frustration, was an enduring sense that I was one of the last men in the game with any reason to complain about whatever cards might be dealt me. You take the best, you do as Joe Mercer said, you celebrate it and store it against the worst the future can bring, and then you always play the game as well as you can.
For me, playing the game was in itself the greatest reward, the biggest incentive to face another day on the balls of my feet. Winning trophies would only ever be a bonus. As long as I could say that – and it would be so for another few years – I could live with the downside of the glory, the truth, as Geoffrey Green was never shy of citing, that into every life a little rain must fall. It just happened that the two games we played early in the new season, against the Argentine side Estudiantes in the World Club Championship, added up to a bit of a torrent.
Many felt that, in view of the state of Anglo-Argentina football relations after the scarring of the World Cup quarter-final, the Old Man would have been wise to have turned down the chance to win a title that for many was at best an irrelevance and at worst a potential ambush of football values – a situation produced almost entirely by the long failure of the European and South American football cultures to come to any solid ground of mutual understanding.
Twenty-four years later, at a Fifa committee shortly before the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea, I learned there had been a frightening lack of progress against cheating and unfair practices. Indeed, there was a widening disregard for what I have always thought of as the fundamentals of the game when it is played properly: respect for the game, yourselves and your opponents. Sepp Blatter, the president, said to about twenty former players gathered around a big table, ‘We’ve got another World Cup coming up in a few months’ time. Could any of you tell me what you most want to see to make it a good tournament?’
There was silence around the table until I pressed the button for the translation and said, ‘One thing I would like to see is players not trying to get each other in trouble by feigning injury, by diving in the eighteen-yard box and holding on to each other – if we could rid the World Cup of this type of behaviour it would be a tremendous start. As an ex-player I hate to see these things. They are spoiling football for everyone, and especially all those
