Football

Young giants

John Moyniham

It had been a fairly quiet day at the Evening Standard a middle-aged model suing herr millionaire baronet lover for the return eu jewellery dominated the front pages of the afternoon editions; Prime Minister Harold Macmillan announced from Melbourne that sterling was strong. After four p.m., the late men prepared to go home. It was 6 February 1958.

As general dogsbody, assistant lance jael

to the debonair news editor, Ronald Hyde,' took one final look at the teleprinter machines and even as I glanced down, one,

began to splutter and shake RUSH Oa' meant something big, and it was: the first

news through agency of the Manchester United air disaster. All hands on deck rushing reporters, bellowing sub-editors, one copy boy crying -uncontrollably in corner. The final night extra editio0 splashed a story as stark in the memorY as the assassination of President Kennedy:

'MANCHESTER UNITED PLAO DISASTER MANY FEARED DEAD

Airliner flying the stars home falls on houses . . . 'A reporter hammered away at his battered Imperial: 'An Elizabethan airliner carrying the famous Manchester United football team crashed as it took of.f from Munich, The players were on their

way home from Belgrade where yesterdaY they won their way into the semifinals of the European Cup.' The loss was appallinF,'

mourning national among those who din not survive were the co-pilot, eight Man" chester United players including the legen; dary Duncan Edwards, three members 0' the playing staff, and eight journalists.

The late author, H. E. Bates, was driving, home on the night of the crash. He refuse°

to believe what he read on the newspaPer

placards: 'My immediate reaction,' wrote later, 'was, I confess, a mildly cynical

one. The announcement seemed to me t° belong precisely to the same categorY 85 'Winston Churchill in Car Crash'. . At 0 o'clock, out of pure curiosity, I turned en my television set. As the news came on, the screen seemed to go black. The norMallY urbane voice of the announcer seemed t° turn into a sledgehammer.' Bates wrote sadly of the loss of BusbY.,',5, 'flashing young giants'. Not since the Bat"' of the Somme and other first World wsrf bloodbaths had there been such a display 0, public mourning in Manchester. `Silchester in the Manchester Guardian assumed Sir

Matt had had it and produced this movull near-orbit'Above all [Busby] recognise. ;

in hitherto unparalleled numbers, players very early in their lives. He warite" them so to think about the game that when! movement broke down, they spun a freS" elle out of its fragments. Because he had no 'late for drilled footballers, the genius he discovered remained. His players were men at their own right, so that youths like Colman, Edwards and Whelan stood out as Characters as well as fine players.' Sir Matt recovered from his injuries to Manage later, successful Manchester United sides (Denis, Georgie, Bobby, et al.) and in one evocative piece in his autobiography Soccer at the Top, told all about What it is like to be in an air crash: 'We did 'lot take off. The roar returned to a drone, We turned round, and idled back to the tunway. If take-off brings on that twinge of tension, take-off failure does nothing to 'educe it . . . We settled back again, and again we sped in a great din of engines. But tve sped on and on and on and my thoughts sounded just like that, "On and on and on", until they changed to "Too long, too long, too long". We were not going up. . . Next I sec through those mists a brief, a fleeting ,glance in a snatch of consciousness. I see a Dig room with several covered bodies in it. I think I can hear now a doctor looking down at one of them saying "This one is dead".' Death can magnify great promise and turn it into greatness. The hysteria fol1„%ving the crash manoeuvred the Busby babes' (that ghastly, coined nickname) into the indestructible class, a view members of the marvellous Real Madrid side of that Period would justly query, because they gave Busby's young side a lesson or two When they met in the European Cup ties. \'et United were a side on 'the verge of greatness' in the view of Geoffrey Green, former Association Football Cor,respondent of The Times. Green would nave been on the plane at Munich but for a sodden change of mind by a Printing House Square executive who sent him protesting to a Wales-Israel match instead because of economy reasons.

The loss of internationals like Tommy aylor and Roger Byrne proved a catastrophic blow to England's World Cup hopes la 1958. But above all, the main blow was

tile loss of Edwards, centre half, wing half, scoring centre forward, the only player, as Hobby Charlton — a Munich survivor — told

Qreen, who made him feel inferior. In Green's opinion, Edwards would have aPtained the England side for years and °een our captain in the 1966 World Cup victory. 'I don't know where they would have found a place for Bobby Moore.' My

0svn personal memory of Edwards is of a 8,argantitan performer, towering, yet perfectly balanced, blessed with speedy reac

liens, pushing forward through the mud,

either attached to the ball, or calling for it, 1,he perfect all-rounder. 'At first I thought ,uuncan was muscle-bound.' says Green. But I was soon proved wrong. Duncan was a natural, a wonderful player.' Busby's squad was very different from (May's highly paid and sometimes spoilt Performers. It was the era of National IS)ervice: the 'Babes' had either done their, or were about to. Short haircuts pre

dominated, young men then were generally obedient and willing to 'obey' despite their rotten salaries as national entertainers. Charlton remembers going to Old Trafford on Sunday mornings to do a bit of extra training under assistant manager Jimmy Murphy. And even when he was playing for England, Edwards would kick a football to and from the wall of his own backyard. He had an appetite and love for football which sent him bounding into Busby's office to plead to play in a mid-week reserve match when he was a regular member of the first team.

As lovable entertainers, United took some beating — only Tottenham Hotspur in their 1960s prime rivalled them in my opinion. At Highbury the other week some of us, including Green, recalled their last match, in London a few days before the disaster, when 63,000 people saw them beat Arsenal 5-4 in a league match. Easy to be sentimental but . . . first shut the eyes and think of a team in all-white strip facing the Gunners, all confident, reigning champions of the Football League. A free kick taken by Edwards twenty-five yards out — Jack Kelsey, the Welsh international, the Arsenal goalkeeper, is no mean performer. Edwards runs forward and curves over the ball and hoofs it with all his might at surface level into the far corner of the net. Twenty years ago — and all that — the memory lives on.