The Lost Babes: Manchester United and the Forgotten Victims of Munich. Jeff Connor

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СКАЧАТЬ was a members’ club called the Cromford in Cromford Court, close by the site of the Arndale Shopping Centre, a place where United’s players regularly congregated, but you had to behave because Dad would go in there. It was a good place to take girlfriends and as long as they weren’t breaking the rules, Dad was quite happy with the lads being there. He’d often send them over a drink. We would go there after the pubs closed to do a little gambling at the tables, watch the floor show, and have a good meal of scampi while it was on.’

      The money to feed all this extravagance did go a long way, particularly for footballers who could earn £15 a week, some £9 above the average wage, and the equivalent of around £16,000 a year in modern currency, a sum that would be sniffed at by a Third Division apprentice today. That basic wage could be augmented by a win bonus of £2 and a ‘signing-on fee’ of £10. The captain Roger Byrne’s salary for 1957, for example, comprised a basic wage of £744 from the club, plus league match bonuses of £72, talent money of £45, European Cup bonuses of £60 and an accrued benefit sum of £150. While not actually rolling in the stuff in the manner of his 2005 counterpart Roy Keane, Byrne could be said to have been comfortably off. And unlike many before or since, he had already worked out that he could not play forever, that a footballer’s career was far from finite. He had a newspaper column in the Manchester Evening News, several minor sponsorships including a Raleigh bicycle endorsement and, in the cerebral manner that always attended his play on the football field, was already, as 1958 and his twenty-ninth birthday approached, planning for a life outside football.

      According to Harry Gregg, who can be quite dogmatic about these things, Colman, Roger Byrne, Albert Scanlon, a skinny, but predatory and remarkably consistent insideforward from Moss Side called Dennis Viollet and the luckless full-back Geoff Bent were the heart of United ‘because they were really Manchester Busby Babes’.

      At the time of his death, Byrne was long past any definition of Babehood, although he did fulfil the criteria demanded by Gregg. Born in the east Manchester suburb of Gorton, a village of two-up, two-down red-brick Victorian homes brightened only by the 130-acre rural oasis of Debdale Park, Roger was brought up by Bill and Jessie Byrne in a warm, sports-loving family environment. Bill Byrne worked in the furniture department at Lewis’s in Piccadilly and his highly intelligent son earned a scholarship to Burnage Grammar School.

      Roger played his early football for Ryder Brow Juniors in Gorton and also boxed and played rugby for the RAF, who overlooked the future England full-back for their services football team. His future wife Joy, then Joy Cooper, remembers a ‘very good sportsman. It was touch and go whether he played cricket or football, and he was also a good golfer. He also boxed for the RAF, who strangely thought he wasn’t good enough for their football team. He was good at every sport, in fact. I loved ice skating and used to go regularly with a crowd from the hospital to the Ice Palace in Manchester. He wasn’t supposed to go, but we dragged him along one time. He had never skated before and he just put the boots on and off he went; it really annoyed everyone. We kept saying “for goodness sake, don’t fall over” but he never did.’

      It was Joe Armstrong who first recognized the promise of the fifteen-year-old schoolboy in a Lancashire Amateur League fixture in 1945. Byrne and a Ryder Brow teammate, a whippet-thin winger called Brian Statham, were offered amateur forms. Byrne accepted, Statham decided to stick to his first sporting love with happy consequences for both Lancashire cricket and England.

      On the football field, Byrne is now acknowledged as one of the Old Trafford greats although, as with so many players, Busby struggled to find the right position for him. His remarkable pace had made him a natural winger initially, but it was a position he despised and it was only when the United management moved him to full-back that he blossomed, as his 275 first-team appearances and thirtythree consecutive England appearances before Munich demonstrate. His calculating football brain, what would be signalled as ‘professionalism’ today, did not always sit well with rival supporters. ‘Booed Byrne Just Loved It’ screamed a Daily Mirror headline above a match report of a Manchester derby in 1957. Never averse to blatant timewasting if United were ahead with a few minutes to go, or taking up the cudgels on behalf of more timid team-mates when necessary—he was official minder to Colman and Viollet in their early days—Roger Byrne was barracked at the best grounds in England.

      His talent as a full-back was hard to define, although not to the countless players he subdued, including two of the greatest England wingers, Stanley Matthews and Tom Finney. The Wizard of Dribble and the Preston Plumber seldom got much change out of Byrne.

      ‘Roger was very, very bright,’ says former team-mate John Doherty. ‘He couldn’t tackle, had no left foot—even though he played left full-back—was a poor header of the ball, and I have never seen a better left-back in my life. Brains and pace. Tackling was demeaning to Roger. He preferred to pinch it or make them give it him. Jimmy Murphy used to say to the full-backs: “Don’t tackle them and they will finish up giving you the ball. You have done your job once they cross the ball.” Roger was brilliant at that.’

      As a member of the 1951-52 title-winning side, Byrne also retained a certain hauteur, with the gravitas and occasional intolerance of an older generation.

      On one pre-season training camp, he cuffed a youthteam player called Wilf McGuinness round the ear for daring to take his chair by the hotel pool, and more than once other Jack-the-lads at United suffered fearsomely memorable bollockings, Eddie Colman in particular. They would never dare answer back.

      ‘Saturday night, we would go out dancing and have a few drinks,’ says Sandy Busby. ‘Sunday morning it was always Mass with Dad and then I used to go back home and then shoot off down to the ground. All the lads used to go down, particularly if you were injured. There would be a five-a-side or runs round the ground. This Sunday we had been to a party, the usual gang of Eddie, Peggy and myself. It was two or three o’clock and Eddie was there at the ground looking like death and who walks down the tunnel but Roger? He comes up to us and says: “Sandy, would you mind leaving us?” I carry on, Roger walks back up the tunnel and Eddie comes back very red and flustered. “All right?” I asked. “Roger just told me if I don’t get a grip, I’ll be out of here,” says Eddie.’

      It was this respect engendered in others, along with a high moral code and a peerless football brain that convinces Sandy Busby to this day that the captain could have succeeded his father and managed Manchester United.

      He says: ‘I used to see both of them talking quietly together and I was sure Dad was grooming Roger to take over,’ he says. Byrne was never a yes man however, confronting Busby on several occasions over the rights of players, their entitlement to bonuses and even on-field tactics. He fell out with the manager at the end of his debut season in 1951-52 over a demand for an increase in bonuses and on another occasion narrowly avoiding being thrown out of the club altogether.

      According to the manager’s son, ‘In his early days Roger was a handful, an awkward bugger. He didn’t like playing at outside left, he wasn’t happy at all and at one time even asked for a transfer.

      ‘On the end-of-season tour of America in 1952 things got even worse. United played against a team of kickers from Mexico and Dad tells them, “These fellas will try and get you riled but just ignore it, walk away.” In the first five minutes Roger gets kicked up in the air and he whacks the next one who comes near him. Off he goes. At half-time Dad walks in the dressing room and tells him: “You’d better get changed. What did I tell you?” Roger was still a bit cocky so Dad says: “Get your gear together, you’re going back home.” That night Johnny Carey goes to my Dad’s room and tells him Roger is distraught. He’s in tears. Dad told Carey that Roger would have to stand up at a team meeting next day and apologize to his team-mates and then he can stay. He did. After that, Roger became more of a team man and then he became captain.’

      Gregg insists: ‘Roger Byrne, who I played against at international СКАЧАТЬ