However wonderfully he performed on Saturday afternoons, George was a member of a team and his sense of the responsibilities of that had slipped to a degree dangerous to both him and anyone who was trying to impose some basic levels of discipline at the club. That was still the Old Man’s job, but my position was, to say the least, delicate.
I understood the frustrations of those players who argued that there should be only one set of rules, and that they should apply to everyone, whatever the level of their talent – but then I also tried to look at the situation through the eyes of the manager. George – helped by that extraordinary capacity to live his life on his own terms and yet so often brilliantly disguise the effects – could still ravage any opposition in his unique way. Even if you worried about his prospects in the longer term, for the moment it was still plain that we could not easily jettison such a talent.
The problem with George was progressive throughout the reigns of three of the men who succeeded the Old Man – Wilf McGuinness, Frank O’Farrell and Tommy Docherty; all of them would face the dilemma of measuring genius against the need to install discipline that covered everyone at the club.
George would, down the months – and not least in the spring of 1970 when he was caught with a girl in a hotel room by Wilf on the day of our FA Cup semi-final replay with Leeds United – work himself into the core of United’s growing crisis. He was hard to live with, in some professional terms, but could we live without him?
The question was increasingly to the forefront of our affairs – and it would become particularly so, for example, when you considered the height of the hurdle barring our way to a second straight appearance in the European Cup final. Success in the semi-final would have quite dramatically obscured the extent of our slippage as one of the strongest teams at home and abroad.
We would have liked to take our chances against two of the other three survivors in the competition, Ajax of Amsterdam or Spartak Trnava, the champions of Czechoslovakia, but instead we drew the most formidable team: AC Milan, our conquerors in those desperate post-Munich days.
Polished and prompted by Gianni Rivera, a star of the Italian national team, Milan played the classic Italian game, rock solid in defence and always looking for breaks. They did maximum damage on two of them, their second goal of the first leg coming from their Swedish inter national winger Kurt Hamrin, who was also involved in the dismissal of John Fitzpatrick, found guilty of kicking the Swede off the ball. Nor did it help when Nobby was forced to limp out of the match.
By now, we knew that the Old Man was about to surrender the reins at Old Trafford. He had gathered us together one day after training to say that he felt it was time for him to step down from running the team, though he would not be walking away; he would still be involved with the club and still willing us on into new challenges. This was the most powerful of incentives. What better parting present could there be than another European Cup?
At Old Trafford, we threw ourselves at Milan, but their defence – in which my old World Cup final opponent Karl Heinz Schnellinger had recovered some of the poise he had lost when trying to curb the amazing energy of Alan Ball at Wembley – were as defiant as they had been in San Siro. After the first game, the odds were always going to be severe, but at the very least we could run ourselves into the floor. Denis Law had a goal disallowed and with the Milan defence so strong and unforgiving the disappointment of that was compounded. However, after seventy minutes George Best once again demonstrated why the Old Man had decided to turn away from any zero tolerance policy with regard to his time-keeping at the training ground. George took on the Milan defence and won, before playing me in so that I could score from an acute angle.
Naturally, we laid siege to the Milan goal but the catenaccio – the bolted door of Italian defence – had been slammed back into place. It was immovable in the face of all of George’s wiles, Denis’s lunges and my attempts to break it down. Afterwards, Sir Matt – like Alf, he too had been knighted in the wake of the outstanding moment in his career – shook our hands and thanked us for our efforts.
Perhaps no football man on earth had learned to walk with such grace along the fine line between the greatest of success and disappointment – and if this, as he then believed, was his last competitive match in charge of the team who had become the centre of his life, at least he had the satisfaction of seeing a fighting effort. If, undoubtedly, we were not the team that had run so hard and played so well in the Bernabeu a year earlier, it was clear that he realised we had fought that reality as best we could.
What no one, including the Old Man, could know, was that what had happened against Milan represented a pivotal moment in our history. Manchester United finally stepped down, for the best part of the next two decades, from that status that had first been achieved in the years after the war when they became the team that carried a special aura whenever they walked on to the field.
Of course there had been the lean time after Munich, but that was an inevitable interlude created by the most tragic of circumstances, and the truth was that if the accident was devastating, it also added to the mystique
