My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography by Bobby Charlton

Author:Bobby Charlton [Charlton, Bobby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2014-11-26T13:00:00+00:00

15

TEAM OF STARS

ON THE FIELD, if not always off it, I understood immediately the meaning of the arrival of first Denis Law, then George Best. In the past I had wondered whether my ideal of the Manchester United player had been lost forever. Now that doubt vanished.

Though we were never close in a day-by-day, personal way, and our lives rarely intertwined beyond the affairs of the football club, we knew how each of us contributed to the rise of the team, and I know, when everything else was set aside, we gloried in our ability to make exciting and, quite often, beautiful football. That was our pride. Our good luck was to be thrown together, and this was the mark of Matt Busby’s genius in grasping the chemistry of the game: how different characters and types of talent could meld so well that, at the very best of times, they became one. Denis would always be a loner to quite a sharp degree, the maverick Scot making his own sense of all that he found before him, and George, of course, went his own way so often when the training was done – with or without his involvement – in the later stages of his time at Old Trafford. It is the way things are, I imagine, in any dressing room or company of men when great deeds are achieved: individual strengths and weaknesses are absorbed, and compensated for, in the growth of a winning team.

I will always be proud to have been part of the Big Three, to have my name linked forever with George and Denis, and that was the overwhelming feeling I know Denis and I shared when we all came together one last time in the hospital room in London shortly before George died at the end of 2005.

But before the Big Three attracted so much of the attention and the glory in the third coming of Busby’s United, there was the Big Four – the rather ironic title Shay Brennan, David Herd, Nobby Stiles and I applied to our dressing-room alliance in those formative years of a new and all-conquering team. At the start there were just the three of us: Shay, always amiable and mischievous and carefree; David, the new signing from Arsenal; and me. We drifted together quite naturally, played cards, went to the pictures and for a while I used to go to the dogs at Belle Vue with Shay.

I was never really interested in the dog racing itself, but I enjoyed Shay’s company, you could have a good meal at the track, and I found it remarkable that it didn’t seem to matter to him whether he won or lost. He was drawn to the excitement and the uncertainty, and when he lost he simply shrugged his shoulders. I remember being in the dressing room one morning when someone said that Shay had taken a big loss at the dogs – it was when my attendance had fallen, partly because of

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