It was certainly a time when everyone at Old Trafford, including the Old Man, was obliged to examine their performance and their roles in the descent into crisis. Bill Foulkes had decided that it was time to retire. Denis Law would shortly move to his former club Manchester City. Nobby Stiles had already gone.
Once again, I found it impossible to attach individual blame, or at least to apportion too much specific responsibility. Many of the players thought Frank was too remote and there was no doubt about the fact that in one respect his regime was completely different from the Busby way. The Old Man was always approachable. Often he would come down to the training field in his track suit, and always you had the sense that he was weighing the atmosphere and the state of commitment and belief. Frank was more formal. Almost all our day-by-day contact was with the coach Malcolm Musgrove and though he was always agreeable, and full of ideas and commitments, some of the players thought this wasn’t enough. We needed more involvement from the new boss.
Once, Frank made an attempt to break the cycle. He gathered the players together and said, ‘Well, you tell me what is wrong.’ Some of the senior players threw their hats in the ring, and the consensus was that there was no doubt the squad needed strengthening if we were to maintain our place in the game, but then the arguments trailed off, and nothing had changed. Our confidence continued to slip away.
Naturally, the arrival of Tommy Docherty was another reason to make me think about how much time I had left as a player. Though he would always treat me with great consideration, he was something of a change from the manager I had known all my professional life. However, if the Old Man had decided that Docherty and his hard driving, and sometimes quite noisy assistant Tommy Cavanagh would bring the style that we needed in our situation, I was ready to go along. But for how long was quite another matter.
The question was really about me, and the strength of my own feelings as to how long I wanted to play, rather than what was going on elsewhere in the club.
In our day-to-day working relationship there was no point of friction between the manager and me, and I think that was seen on every occasion I needed to seek his help. I didn’t want any special treatment from Tommy, and he was good to me in the sense that he never even hinted that I was coming from the direction of someone who expected any privileges. ‘Aye, come back in a day or two,’ he would say when I asked him for the odd leave of absence, perhaps to do something like a personal appearance for a friend. This may seem like a relatively trivial matter, but it is on such details that relationships between a manager and a player can go awry. Tommy seemed to accept that I knew more about my need for good fitness than anyone else, and that I wouldn’t let a couple of days off here and there have any negative impact. I appreciated that.
Earlier in his career – and as time went on at Old Trafford it would be displayed again – ‘The Doc’ had shown a more abrasive side of his nature, and when he left United after his five-year stint there would be some familiar swirls of controversy. He lost a libel action taken against Willie Morgan, and his relationship with Mary Brown, the wife of team physiotherapist Laurie, was the sensationally reported prelude to a typically stormy exit. However, these were developments that would come when I was gone. Whatever else was said about Tommy Docherty, there was no question about the fact he knew the game – and how to fight.
For me, though, the most valuable product of his long experience as a player and manager at the top level of club and international football was his understanding of how it was for a player who had to get the timing right in one of the most painful decisions of his life. The truth was, I had found it harder than I could ever have imagined getting to the point of advising Docherty that I had decided it was finally time to walk away. The manager was using all his wiles, his tough professional instincts, to postpone relegation for a year, but for me it was getting progressively difficult on the field. Some days I walked off the pitch thinking, ‘I’m not sure how long I can go on.’ But then there were some frightening questions: what do I do next? How have I prepared for the days after I retire? And even: how do you go about quitting? How do you turn your back on all those things which have shaped your life?
I didn’t consciously pull back in my effort, but sometimes I did have the terrible sense that I was running for the sake of it; all the old optimism, the innate belief that I had the means to shape the outcome of any match, was dwindling. I was reaching the point when Saturday morning was no longer the greatest part of the week: the time when you woke up full of questions about the day’s opposition, and how you and your team-mates would perform. With a couple of months to go to the end of the season, I finally realised that I was playing my last games for Manchester United. We were playing Birmingham City and I couldn’t remember ever running so hard and so long, not even under the whip of Jimmy Murphy. I chased and I chased, but there was nothing there for me, not even one of those sweet moments which had always lifted me. We lost the match and, I do not think it is too dramatic to say, I lost that last belief that,
