Looking back, it is some comfort that towards the end of his life he did have the clearest indication that the search he was embarking upon when I drove him to Scotland had almost certainly ended in success. As we were playing our golf and musing on the future, a very different football man was contemplating the end of his playing career, and concentrating his mind on the challenge of becoming a great manager. It would take more than a decade for the strength of the former Rangers centre forward Alex Ferguson to truly emerge, and for Manchester United those years would be uncertain and often difficult ones, but the great bonus was that, when he did eventually arrive at Old Trafford, the ambitions and dreams inspired by Matt Busby remained as intense as ever.
For me, though, the drive home from Scotland, despite the restlessness and concerns of the Old Man, brought no change in my view of football: I trained, I played and I thanked God for an existence which had met all of my boyhood hopes. My basic ambition was the same as it had always been. I would wake up in the morning lifted by the knowledge that I still loved to play football more than anything else, and that I would be safe for as long as this was true.
But then, I suppose, you can detach yourself from certain realities only for so long. I reckoned I had a few years left, give or take the size and the menace of the clouds that were now, as probably anyone could see, beginning to form over what I had seen as the unbreakable citadel of Old Trafford.
It meant that I had a very simple option. I had to take the best of what was left – and live as well, and as uncomplainingly, as I could with the rest.
22
THE OLD MAN STEPS BACK
ALTHOUGH I SHARED the growing concern about what would happen after the now inevitable abdication of the Old Man, the rest of my football life remained on a diet of hopefulness. The ebbing of belief that we were still a major force would be spread over a few years. It is one of the great aspects of football – hope is usually one of the last casualties.
As I pushed into my thirties, I could congratulate myself that I was still playing the game for a living at the highest level. I couldn’t imagine doing anything that would be better or more satisfying, and certainly there was nothing that could be more enjoyable on a recurring, daily basis. Yes, I was moving into the wrong end of my career, but I still felt good when I did my work on the training field and went out to play.
I was also still deeply involved with the now knighted Alf Ramsey’s England and many said we were stronger than in 1966, with players like Colin Bell, Francis Lee and Alan Mullery pushing hard for their places in the Mexican sun of the 1970 World Cup, when we would have good reason to believe in our chances of defending our title.
At home, it was true that there was a feeling that the United team really had only one way to go unless it was dramatically refitted by Sir Matt Busby – who, on top of his other concerns, was still reluctant to plunge all the profits into the transfer market – but some days did see a flaring of hope. These were days when the fingers on the clock seem to flick back magically a year or so; when the old chemistry stirred.
With the exception of a taut night in Brussels, when Anderlecht attacked our 3–0 first-leg lead (explosively created by a revived Denis Law) so strongly that we were happy to edge through on a 4–3 aggregate, in general we eased our way through to the semi-finals of the European Cup.
In the league George Best, assisted mainly by new signing Willie Morgan from Burnley, helped us travel back to the peak of the mid-sixties in an 8–1 demolition of Queens Park Rangers – a performance that, despite the weakness of the London team, provided enough momentum for us to play our way out of a dawning threat of relegation. There was also a burst of promise in the fifth round of the FA Cup, when Birmingham were thrashed 6–2, but that particular tide turned against us soon enough when we met Everton in the next round.
Of course there was still much quality in our team, but there was also considerable wear and tear. Nobby, for instance, was being betrayed by his knees, submitting to a serious operation and then endangering his recovery in his enthusiasm to be playing again. Perhaps, like the rest of his older team-mates, he had an anxiety to prove that he was as good and as strong as he ever was. John Aston, who had looked so indestructible in the European Cup final, broke a leg against Manchester City just at that point in his career when he had truly established himself as a significant player. He fought his way back, but he was never quite the same and soon he was being transferred to Luton Town. Brian Kidd suffered a scoring block and suffered his first injuries.
However, when you looked at the personality and the confidence of the team, perhaps the most serious indication of a problem was the fact that as captain I was beginning to be asked by some of my team-mates: ‘What’s happening with George?’
The truth was that George Best, though still just in his mid-twenties, was making less and less effort to conform to the basic requirements of a professional footballer; if he wasn’t absent from training, he was late, and though, when he did appear, his extraordinary physical resilience was as
