It must have been tremendous pressure, and sometimes you could see that he was under great stress. On one of our better days, when we beat Manchester City in the FA Cup at Old Trafford – after Wilf had had to face the psychological warfare that Malcolm Allison waged so skilfully in the media, knowing that a bad result might have devastating effects on the faith of both the club and the fans in his ability – his relief filled the dressing room. He was the latest football man inhabiting that perilous ground between success and failure, but no one had done it, at that point in English football, under such a harsh spotlight.
The change, overnight, in Wilf’s position could not have been more demanding – and, emotionally speaking, nor could the circumstances of his demotion in December 1970. After home defeats by Manchester City and Arsenal, with the gate dropping to a mere 33,182 for the second game, and then the League Cup semi-final defeat by Aston Villa who were then in the Third Division, the Old Man decided that, however reluctantly, he had to come back to full management. It was a cruel situation for Wilf, but sentiment runs only so far in football. We were eighteenth in the league and confronted by an old nightmare which had previously come in the days after Munich – our first post-war relegation.
While Sir Matt gathered the shell-shocked troops together for a meeting in which he said we were fighting for our own futures as well as the club’s, Wilf returned to his role as second-team coach. Later he went to work in Greece for a few years, followed by managing York briefly and then serving Bury in various capacities including coach and trainer, caretaker manager and physiotherapist.
You could only guess at the depth of his sadness when he went off to make a new life away from that place which had dominated all his professional thoughts and hopes for so long. All you could do was shake his hand, thank him for his friendship and hope that in time the hurt would pass.
Faced by the humiliating possibility of demotion, and no doubt reassured to some extent by the mystical aura that still surrounded the Old Man, we rallied to eighth place by the end of the season, winning eleven of our last eighteen games.
The last stand of Sir Matt Busby as a working manager started with a 2–1 win at Stamford Bridge, where we overcame the deficit caused when Alan Hudson – who with team-mates like Peter Osgood and Charlie Cooke was painting an extremely bright future for Chelsea – scored early in the second half. Denis Law was fouled in the box, Willie Morgan converted the penalty, and then, with just a few minutes left, one of the young contenders, Alan Gowling, ran through for the winner. The Old Man was back, said the headlines, and all the old confidence had been restored to Manchester United. It was a pretty thought, but among the players there was no illusion that Matt Busby was doing anything more than holding the line at Old Trafford as a new search for his successor was launched.
The holding part, at least, was a successful operation and for the Old Man’s last match in charge of the team – the final league game at, of all places, Maine Road – we managed to produce one of our most committed performances of a difficult season. We won 4–3, and for me the scoring line-up still reads like some attempt to recreate a more glittering past: Charlton, Law and Best (2). It was a terrific game, with Francis Lee at the heart of City’s fight back after we took a 3–0 lead, and on the way home, amid all the other emotions, I had the satisfaction of feeling that, on his last day as the manager of Manchester United, Matt Busby had almost certainly been reminded of what his work would always represent most strikingly: a willingness to nourish talented players, to give them freedom to express all their ability.
Poignantly, ironically, call it what you like, the outstanding performance of the day came from George Best. He ran, he dribbled, he dipped into his great reserves of genius. On that day at Maine Road, George was once again announcing that he was George – untamable, both on and off the field. He was such a great player that maybe it was inevitable that the growing crisis of his career, and his life, should coincide with the one facing the football club he had lifted so high and so brilliantly.
23
THE BAND CAN’T PLAY FOREVER
ONE OF THE charges against Frank O’Farrell, who, like Wilf McGuinness, would be in command for just eighteen months, was that he was excessively suspicious of what he considered the powerfully lingering influence of the Old Man – that instead of embracing the experience and the help of the manager who had created the meaning of Manchester United, he was too keen to draw a line under all that had gone before.
Something else Frank and Wilf had in common was their
