Then the second leg started and the first thing that happened was ‘whack’. They were coming at us again with all that unscrupulous fury they had displayed back home in the Boca stadium. Once again we were plunged into mayhem. From the point of view of winning the game, as opposed to avoiding a full-scale riot, Ramon Veron (the father of Juan Sebastian Veron, the wonderfully skilled player who was never able to deliver his best in his short stay at Old Trafford) put us in a critical position after just six minutes. Veron was known as ‘the Witch’ in Argentina and it was not hard to understand why. Like his son, he had tremendous skill – indeed it seems like a South American birthright – and he also had an equally freely distributed mean streak. Estudiantes had caught us on the break, as we pursued the aggregate equaliser, and Veron coolly put the ball past Alex Stepney.
In the hands of a Yugoslav referee, the game never quite descended to the depths of violence and skullduggery seen in Buenos Aires, but it was plain enough that neither team would finish with eleven players. George Best was sent off, with the defender Medina, in the last minutes, a fact which overshadowed Willie Morgan’s late goal and filled the following day’s newspapers with headlines about soccer scandal and shame. Had a reporter been in the tunnel, there would have been even more substance to the claims that inter-continental club football was probably an irredeemably dangerous enterprise. Nobby Stiles, who was sitting in the stands, reported that he rushed down to the dressing room when, at the final whistle, he saw the big Estudiantes goalkeeper Poletti dashing off the field with what seemed like the clear intention of challenging George, but by the time Nobby got down to the tunnel his role as protector had already been taken, not for the first time, by Paddy Crerand. Paddy, who was proud to have come from one of Glasgow’s harder schools of self-protection, was attacking the goalkeeper with some relish. By now, the Old Man was no doubt reflecting on the wisdom of his South American adventure. He stepped in between the combatants, sighed, and said, ‘That’s enough of that, Paddy.’
For Matt Busby, as he headed into a season that would see us finish a deeply mediocre eleventh in the First Division, knocked out of the FA Cup in the sixth round by the rising power of Alan Ball’s Everton, and lose our grip on the European Cup in the semi-finals against AC Milan, it may well have been the moment when he finally decided that maybe he had had enough.
It was around this time that he surprised me one day with an invitation to join him on a golf trip to Scotland. There was a Bing Crosby tournament at Turnberry, he said, and he would like to go up for a few days. To me, it was almost unthinkable that a player should go off with the manager like this, but he was insistent and I couldn’t see that I had any alternative but to say yes. I socialised with the Old Man much less than some of the other senior players, but I had never refused a request from him throughout all my days at Old Trafford either, and it plainly wasn’t the time to start. We had been together so long now, and I got the impression that he had a lot on his mind. What it mostly was, I learned soon enough, and it confirmed that earlier suspicion of mine that deep down he had become drained and made weary by the constant need to be setting standards – and winning trophies. Maybe victory in the European Cup had indeed signalled to him that his active life’s work had reached a natural point of closure.
As I drove up to Scotland, we talked about the good and the bad times of the past, and the uncertainties of the future. He talked about the weight of pressure on the manager of Manchester United, the sense that you always had to be one step ahead, always moving forward.
Naturally, I left most of the talking to him. He asked me my opinion about his possible successors, but the only name he himself mentioned was Dave Sexton, who had been doing some tremendous work with a young and talented Chelsea side. I said that Sexton seemed to be an extremely good football man, and a very strong and decent character, but really that was all I could say. I never saw myself as a kingmaker, certainly not then when I was still playing.
It did occur to me that maybe he had something in mind for me. The mere fact that he had decided we should spend a few days together on our own provoked that thought, but I was certainly not inclined to make any claims for myself. I never had, and never would, have ambitions to manage Manchester United. However much I loved the club, and wanted it to do well, I just couldn’t see myself taking the reins. I hadn’t thought of the job, or still less trained myself for it, and the mood of the Old Man didn’t provide any new incentive. He made it clear that in some ways he had gone on under sufferance, out of a sense of duty – and also that no obvious successor had announced himself.
It was good to spend some time with the great man who had been such a powerful influence in my life, who had set the standards that I had always tried to follow, but it was sad, too. I think he felt that as far as he was concerned the best of his contribution had come and now, most probably, gone. He lamented the fact that there was no obvious candidate to take on his
