uk.sports.yahoo.com/blogs/pitchside-europe/manchester-united-s-triumph-10-years-after-their-munich-tragedy-is-still-sport-s-most-powerful-story-113126597.html#uk-tw-poManchester United's triumph 10 years after their Munich tragedy is still sport's most powerful story
It was a scene as pointed as it was poignant. A few months before the 1968 European Cup final at Wembley, the trophy itself was back in London, where reigning champions Celtic were to be recognised as BBC team of the year.
Matt Busby was set to present the award to Jock Stein. Once the statuettes were handed over, and with his own team already eliminated from that season’s competition, the Celtic manager made a gesture towards Busby.
“We hope that the next hands the European Cup are in are yours,” Stein said to his great Manchester United contemporary. Busby couldn’t resist gently touching the European Cup itself, as it stood so tantalisingly beside him.
It was the object - or obsession - that had come to define his life, partially by its absence. For Busby himself, of course - not to mention Bobby Charlton, Bill Foulkes and assistant Jimmy Murphy - it also represented so much more than mere victory or the crowning of the continent’s finest team.
What was deliberately left unsaid in all this was what had happened a decade before. Then again, as virtually everyone who joined Manchester United in the years immediately after 6 February 1958 admitted, the events of that day were just never mentioned.he 57th anniversary of the Munich disaster, Miguel Delaney says Manchester United's recovery and triumph 10 years later remains the most extraordinary tale.
That will not be the case today, on the 57th anniversary of the Munich air disaster, when 23 people died and a great young team was destroyed just when they seemed up on the cusp of delivering the European Cup. The tragic details will again be described, the departed respectfully remembered.
It will naturally be added that Busby rebuilt the club to finally do what Stein hoped: to win the European Cup at Wembley 10 years later by beating Benfica 4-1, along with two of the players who were on the Elizabethan class Airspeed Ambassador with him. That is obviously not just a mere detail. Really, it is the essence of both the Busby Babes as well as United as a whole, and an aspect that has possibly even been underplayed.
There probably isn’t a story in football - or indeed sport - to compare to the journey made by Busby, Charlton and Foulkes from that airfield in Munich to the floodlights of Wembley 10 years later. Very few other careers involve such extreme loss in pursuit of a dream, only for it to eventually be realised by the survivors in the most fitting manner possible. Driving it all was Busby’s assistant Murphy, who defied his own devastation to ensure the club persevered, and also preserved its spirit.
George Best was the player who most evoked the joyful freedom of the Babes, while finally providing the spark that fired United back to those levels, and once spoke about his awe at what the survivors did.
“In 1967-68 it was certainly never mentioned, but we all knew what a terrible experience people like Matt, Bobby and Bill had been through, and we all marvelled at the guts it must have taken... I used to think about it whenever we got on a plane.”
Charlton himself once went solemnly pensive when asked about the Babes by Hugh McIllvanney for a BBC documentary. “It was paradise,” he said, after a moment’s silence. The Babes certainly represented an ideal, a faith in youthful dynamism and defiance.
It was the loss of that ideal that only deepened the more painful loss of so much young life. Everywhere the survivors looked, there was someone so dear missing, something so intangible missing. Reading through Charlton’s autobiography now, it’s impossible not to sense survivor’s guilt.
“How the hell is it possible to come through all that with just a bang on the head and a small cut?”
That was just one mental weight complicating so much of the core grieving. Charlton’s head injury knocked him unconscious, meaning he couldn’t properly register what happened at Munich, but Foulkes saw it all. The trauma brought other issues.
In the exceptional ‘A Strange Kind of Glory’, Eamon Dunphy - who joined United as a youth player in 1960 - says that Foulkes immediately fell out with the other hero of Munich, Harry Gregg. He attributes it to the effects of the day.
Murphy did not travel with the squad for that fateful European Cup match against Red Star Belgrade due to his management of the Welsh national team, but arguably felt it all more acutely than anybody. Due to his work with the United youth teams, he certainly knew the players better than anybody. He also had to get in touch with their families, and go about the near impossible job of replacing the team and keeping the club alive, let alone rebuild it.
That involved putting on the bravest front, but Charlton stated how Murphy was once “discovered in a back corridor of the hospital, sobbing his heart out in pain at the loss of so many young players he had adored”.
Then there was Busby himself, who had come so close to death. Worse, once he eventually recovered, “he felt guilt that it was on the business of his great football dream that his boys had died”.
Charlton admitted doubting whether Busby would be capable of the same conviction, the same decisiveness, whether he was even the same man. Somehow, he stayed in sight of the same dream. He was not the only one.
“I was obsessed with the idea that this football club would indeed get back on the road to progress,” Charlton said. “It would grow strong again.”
It would do so by replicating some of what had gone before. Money expedited the process through signings like Denis Law, but youth graduates such as Nobby Stiles were placed around Foulkes, while Best ensured the old adventure.
It was all the more remarkable that so much of the eventual rise echoed the period of the Babes. Real Madrid had represented the level Busby wanted to reach, and were the first team to eliminate Manchester United from Europe, in the 1956-57 semi-finals. The Spaniards were finally defeated at the same stage 11 years later, but only after Foulkes scored a rare goal to seal United’s first ever final.
There, Charlton scored twice to ensure he also became the first Old Trafford captain to lift the grand old trophy. By that point, Busby had been on the pitch, everyone rushing to him. Munich was still not mentioned in his presence. It didn’t need to be. It had been talked about enough by the media in the build-up and, once, by the squad.
“The night before the final we had a meeting and agreed we had to win it for them,” Foulkes said. “When we won, I felt sadness. My thoughts were with the boys who died at Munich.”
As such, it’s hard to even think about what he, Charlton, Murphy and Busby went through.
Miguel Delaney - @migueldelaney
"United’s flag is deepest red, it shrouded all our Munich dead. Before their limbs grew stiff and cold, their heart’s blood dyed it’s ev’ry fold. Then raise United’s banner high, beneath it’s shade we’ll live and die. So keep the faith and never fear."