Again my reaction had to be that it was circumstances that worked so damagingly against Frank, as they had against Wilf, rather than any great flaw in his knowledge of the game – or of footballers.
My own approach, even as captain, had been to attend to my own business and try to provide leadership on the training field and the pitch by example. I always attempted to steer wide of the politics of the club, something that O’Farrell later insisted wasn’t so in the case of some senior players like Denis Law, Pat Crerand and Alex Stepney.
Also, apart from arguing that the Old Man’s retention of his office at the top of the stairs sent out the message that he was still in charge, Frank said he felt undermined by stories that somebody still referred to as the Boss or the Old Man regularly played golf with players who should now be operating under the sole influence of the new manager. It was almost as though O’Farrell saw the mere presence of Sir Matt as some kind of reproach to himself.
There was also the problem that took a sharp turn for the worse at the end of O’Farrell’s first season, one that started so promisingly with a rush to the top of the league, before a run of seven straight defeats shattered the idea that the manager had found an instant solution to our problems. The big blow came when George Best took off for Spain, insisting that he was quitting the game. He told a horde of reporters on the beach at Marbella that he was drinking a bottle of vodka a day. Whether that was true or not – and you had to pray that it wasn’t – the damage to O’Farrell’s authority was heavy. The key to his job was always going to be dealing with George successfully, and here, after a season which had promised much until a late tailspin dropped us into eighth place in the league, was a huge setback.
The manager urged George to remember that there would be a day when he wouldn’t have the choice between playing the game maybe better than anyone else in the world and doing something else at which he could never hope to be brilliant. For the moment he was young and handsome and was surrounded by people who enjoyed the light of celebrity he created. It wouldn’t always be like this.
O’Farrell’s wise words didn’t bite home and he was disappointed when George failed to join the team for the opening of a summer tour in Israel. There, our troubles were put into perspective when we reflected that only slightly different flight scheduling would have put us in Tel Aviv’s Lod airport when three members of the Japanese Red Army terrorist group took automatic weapons and hand grenades out of violin cases and started firing indiscriminately, killing twenty-six and injuring many more. It was a powerful reminder that sometimes whatever happens within the margins of a football field, or in a club, has to be taken with a certain shrug of resignation. But even with our perspective on life once again properly realigned, there was no escaping the fact that as footballers we were facing some of our most difficult days.
This was proved true quickly enough. We failed to win in our first nine games and the shadow of relegation fell upon us again. O’Farrell complained about the level of press criticism, talking about the ‘violence of the typewriter’, but then I thought this was probably inevitable. When you were Manchester United, one of the last gifts you could expect was patience. Confidence had drained away with the confirmation that the fears first provoked in the second half of the previous season – when, among some bad defeats, we suffered the humiliation of conceding five goals to Leeds United at Elland Road – could not be easily banished.
Frank had been able to push through a couple of excellent signings in Martin Buchan from Aberdeen and Ian Storey-Moore from Nottingham Forest. Unfortunately, such encouragement was nullified by the latter’s injury problems – and the fact that the manager was plainly running out of time at about the same rate suffered by Wilf McGuinness. His third significant signing, the free-scoring Ted MacDougall, who was bought from Bournemouth for £200,000, had scarcely found his way around the corridors of Old Trafford when the axe fell. It came after another five-goal defeat, this time to Crystal Palace. It was Christmas time but no one was humming ‘Jingle Bells’.
It seemed that a little bit of desperation was creeping into a lot of bones and these, I have to say, included my own, which were now thirty-five years old. Certainly there was no doubt I had reached a critical point in my enthusiasm. I no longer felt that surge of expectation which I had always experienced at the dawn of any match I played for Manchester United.
Nobody needed to tell me the extent of the rewards that had come to me, which at this time included a testimonial match against Celtic which raised £45,000, three times more than I had earned in any one season of my career. I had known the best and the worst of days, and was now living through some tough ones; but the job still had to be done, at the very least until the end of this draining season. No doubt Frank O’Farrell would have welcomed the opportunity to do the same but, instead, he went away in anguish that the great opportunity of his career had come and gone. Later, he wrote a book – unpublished for reasons to do with clauses inserted into his severance agreement with United – which was to have been entitled ‘A Nice
