The problem was that Sir Matt Busby had made it clear that resurgence was a burden he could no longer carry, although it was one that was being accepted by hungrier, and maybe less wounded managers like Bill Shankly (for a few years more) and his successors at Liverpool, by Brian Clough at Derby County and by Malcolm Allison a few miles across town at Manchester City.
The Busby legacy was a huge pressure on the managers and players who followed. Eventually of course, men brimming with talent and confidence would arrive in the shape of Bryan Robson, Roy Keane and, in his unique and somewhat eccentric way, Eric Cantona. Most thrilling of all, there would be those heirs to the original Busby Babes: Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes, David Beckham and Nicky Butt and the Neville boys. But before that there would be the desert, one made all the more barren by the raids on the peak of Europe by Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, and then by a team who had lived in our shadows for so long, Aston Villa.
One of the problems, I believed, was that we started to buy inferior players. We went into the market, I sometimes thought, almost for the sake of it without any real guarantees that we were improving our squad.
Down the years a series of managers failed to make the breakthrough and the extent of the problems they faced is surely illustrated by the quality of the credentials they brought to the job: O’Farrell, Docherty, Dave Sexton and Ron Atkinson all arrived at Old Trafford with big reputations and solid bodies of work behind them, but none of them could achieve anything like United’s former glory.
First, though, there was the ordeal of my friend Wilf McGuinness. As a player, Wilf had suffered the most terrible disappointment, but in some ways it seemed that this was mere preparation for the trial which came to him when the Old Man told him that he was going to take a back seat and was putting him in charge of the day-to-day running of the team.
Wilf lived for United, he had fought his injury with exceptional and moving courage, but he failed to succeed in a challenge he plainly felt carried awesome responsibility. Maybe that in itself was part of the reason, maybe it was because he did find it precisely that – awesome.
There was also the fact that whoever it was who arrived to take up Busby’s mantle would have faced massive pressure. Taking over from the Old Man wasn’t just a question of producing a series of good results. It was also about style – that famous aura that was now so frequently being called into question whenever we struggled on the field. There were indeed some tough days out on the pitch. Sometimes, as a midfielder, I felt that I was permanently defending rather than attacking. I did a lot of running, but rarely did it seem to be in the right direction.
The appointment of Wilf turned out to be a trauma for him that stretched out eighteen months before he was relieved of his duties at the tail end of 1970. Famously, tragically, the shock of being told that his leadership of the club to which he had devoted so much was over, caused him to lose all of his hair. It was painful to see Wilf go down because here was one of the great enthusiasts. He had been a great friend to me when we were lads, and played in the England Schoolboys team, and he had made me part of his family life.
There were stories that Wilf changed when he got the job, that he tried too hard to separate himself from players he had been so close to before his elevation, but I didn’t see it that way. He knew he had to alter his relationships with the players; we knew that too; but if that was straightforward enough when you thought about it, it was not so easy in practice. I could only sympathise with the difficulties he faced in his new role – and wonder, given his background in the training set-up, whether he had been placed in an impossible situation.
Wilf had to make some authority for himself, and it would be unfair on him now to forget the huge problems he faced. No longer could he come into the dressing room with his jaunty banter and maybe a new joke; he had to develop, instantly, a certain distance – and making distance between him and people he knew and liked and admired for their football ability could never come easily to him. Certainly I reject some suggestions that he was particularly hard on me. It didn’t fill me with joy that one of his first moves was to drop me, but leaving me out of the team was, I reckoned, maybe one of his rites of passage as the new boss of the dressing room. There was one story that he had me doing press-ups in front of the other players and that it was an act designed to humiliate me. Nonsense. That wasn’t Wilf’s nature at all. I once did have to do press-ups in the dressing room, that’s true, but only as a routine punishment that any of us were subjected to if we were late. Sure, I faced the good-natured taunts of my team-mates – but I was only on the receiving end of something that I had been happy to dish out in the past. There was no problem at all. It was good banter.
Later, he did say that, maybe when he was appointed, he should
