I’ll always be a blue but it was lovely to wear Best’s United shirt
Peter Barnes, the blond-haired blue-eyed winger, on playing for both sides of Manchester...
THE terraced house on Aycliffe Avenue in Chorlton would have looked no different from any other in the street were it not for George Best’s distinctive Lotus parked outside.
Manchester United’s new golden boy was living in digs with his landlady Mrs Fullaway, and the local schoolboys thought nothing about knocking on his door. One of them was Peter Barnes.
‘We’d ask if he was coming out,’ recalls Barnes. ‘George would say, “Hi lads, give me five minutes, I’m just having my tea”. Then he’d play cricket with us in the street. Brilliant.’
Barnes’s dad Ken had been captain of Manchester City, later becoming chief scout and assistant manager. Peter grew up a blue and remains one. But it didn’t stop him wanting to be George Best.
‘He was my idol,’ says Barnes. ‘I think he was everybody’s idol. Every kid in the country was a big George Best fan.
‘Even though I was a big admirer of Neil Young at City, and Mike Summerbee was a great winger, George had everything. I’ve seen nobody like him since. He was a vision. Long hair, shirt over the shorts, socks pulled down.
‘When I was nine, me and my brother Keith, who idolised Best, went to the derby and my dad asked Matt Busby if we could have some autographs.
‘Next thing we’re in the changing room at Maine Road having our programmes signed by Denis Law and Bobby Charlton, who have got towels around them. Denis was big mates with my dad and asked George if he’d give us a lift to Whalley Range. The United players used to go to a woman’s house that had a bar in her front room because it was private and they didn’t get any mither.
‘She’d make sandwiches and pour drinks for the players. So me and our kid get in this Jaguar E-Type and Bestie drives us to have a drink with the players and my dad. Great story isn’t it?’
Barnes is talking about a different Manchester football scene in the 1960s. As now, they were the two best teams in the country but the players socialised together and fans would alternate between watching games at Old Trafford and Maine Road.
‘It was a great time to be growing up in Manchester,’ says Barnes. ‘United won the European Cup and City won the championship in ’68 with an all-English team. That won’t happen again.
‘Back then you had respect for both clubs. My grandfather Fred was a plumber who lived in Moss Side. He would get my rattle and scarf and I’d stand in the Scoreboard End at Maine Road and watch that great team of Francis Lee, Summerbee and Young.
‘As I got older, I’d go to Old Trafford with my brother and our mates to watch Best, Charlton and Law. It wouldn’t happen today, would it? It’s like a war today. If you’re United you hate City, and if you’re City you hate United. I think it’s a bit sad.
‘Players used to live in the suburbs, not in the country like they do now. Chorlton was a great place. You had Matt Busby living on Kings Road and the City manager Joe Mercer living half a mile away on Wyverne Road. My dad was playing for City in the 50s when Bobby Charlton came to United and they used to meet at a cafe bar in town.
‘Bobby would say, “Mr Barnes, would you mind me having a cigarette?” My dad would give him one, but he got fed up after four or five times and said, “Don’t call me Mr Barnes, it’s Ken, and next time buy your own bloody cigarettes!” When I played for City, the United players would go to the Sands nightclub in Stretford Arndale Centre. Then we’d bump into them at our place, Sandpipers on Wilbraham Road.’
One of Ken Barnes’s closest friends was Dennis Viollet, the United forward who survived the Munich air disaster. Another was Law, who lived with the Barnes family when he first joined City from Huddersfield in 1960.
‘I was only a baby at the time, but Denis lived with us and got to know Manchester well,’ says Barnes. ‘He only stayed at City for a year or two but when he moved to United he lived in Chorltonville not far from us.
‘We used to go to his house and he was the first player I saw do a trick where he’d toss a coin up in the air, catch it on his foot and flick it up into his top pocket. Even wearing slippers. I went home and practised. It took me a few years but I did it. Denis Law taught me how and I can still do it today.
‘He and my dad were friends for 50 years. When dad passed away in Macclesfield General seven years ago, I rang Denis and he was the first one there to see my dad when he was dying. I was lucky to have a father who played pro football and grow up in that world.’ BARNES joined City after leaving school aged 15 in 1972 as an apprentice earning £6.50 a week, rising to £23 when he signed his first professional contract two years later.
During that time, his apprenticeship included cleaning boots for Summerbee, Lee and Colin Bell.
‘Franny had the smallest feet, only size six, but the hardest shot,’ he recalls. ‘I had the same size feet as Mike and he’d ask me to break his boots in. I’d sit in the bath for an hour or two for three days with his boots moulding them. Then you would polish and Dubbin them.
‘It was a great apprenticeship. You could smell it when you were a kid, and you wanted to be part of it. You wanted to get a peg in that first-team changing room.
‘Summerbee would spend hours on the pitch at Maine Road telling me how to cross a ball and put it on a sixpence. It’s a dying art now.’
A youth-team player when Law’s back-heel for City added to United’s relegation misery in April 1974, Barnes became
‘Fergie’s face was bright red as he booted the door behind me’
an integral part of the new City side that emerged in the 70s: a blond-haired, blue-eyed left winger and one of the most exciting English players of his generation.
He made his first-team debut six months later aged 17 and played in his first Manchester derby in a League Cup tie at Old Trafford.
‘I came on for Rodney Marsh,’ he recalls. ‘There were 60,000 there and the noise was deafening. You couldn’t shout for the ball, it was too noisy, you had to use sign language.’
Barnes made his big breakthrough the following season. He scored the opening goal in City’s win over Newcastle in the 1976 League Cup final and was voted PFA Young Player of the Year.
‘It was a whirlwind,’ he says. ‘It all happened so young, so quick. The League Cup final, then I got the award the night after. I was in the England team at 19. Ron Greenwood played the great West Ham way with two wingers: me on the left and Steve Coppell on the right. We went 12 games unbeaten playing attacking football. I made my debut against Italy. The right back was a dirty b*****d called Claudio Gentile. What a name, Gentile! He’d kick his own grandmother. He’d stand on your feet, pull your shirt, give you a dig.
‘I ran him ragged at Wembley. We won 2-0 and I stayed in the team for the next four years. I was lucky I got 22 caps for England. Some great players never got one. Tony Currie got 17 and Frank Worthington eight. They were mavericks. These days Worthington and Currie would be gold dust.
‘Paul Gascoigne was probably the last great creative player we’ve had in the last 25 years. That’s a sacrilege of the game.’
Barnes, too, feels that he was a victim of a more pragmatic approach to football in the 80s.
‘In the 70s it was about attacking football, playing with wingers, entertainment, scoring goals. But money started coming into the game and managers were a bit more frightened, more tactical.
‘They’d rather have wide players who could get back and defend. The orthodox winger went out of the game, which hurt me. I didn’t fulfil my potential because it was about hard-working players who would get back behind the ball.
‘Allan Clarke tried to play me at left back at Leeds. I don’t know why he bought me.’
After leaving City for West Bromwich Albion, Leeds and Coventry, Barnes rejoined his old Albion boss Ron Atkinson at United. He is No 25 on the list of 34 players to represent both Manchester clubs.
‘I don’t think City fans liked me playing for them over the road — from the swamp, as they call it. I was only there for two years but it was lovely to put on Bestie’s No 11 shirt, even though I was a blue.’ Atkinson’s side had a flying start to the 1985-86 season, winning their first 10 games. Barnes rediscovered his form and there was talk of an England recall but United’s lead evaporated and Liverpool were champions again.
‘The team he used at the start was 4-4-2 with width,’ says Barnes. ‘We were murdering teams playing entertaining football.
‘I went down with a calf injury because the pitch at Old Trafford was c**p. There was loads of sand on the pitch, and the undersoil heating broke down. I was on the wing and in the winter it was like running on concrete.
‘There were so many injuries to key players. United bought John Sivebaek from Denmark and Colin Gibson from Villa. Two full backs and he played them out wide. Ron bottled it a bit and my dad told him so. The team was never the same. United were obsessed with winning the title. If they had, Ron would have got a five-year deal. But Liverpool winning it killed him.’
Atkinson was replaced by Alex Ferguson, who immediately clamped down on the drinking culture at Old Trafford.
‘Paddy Crerand had a pub in Altrincham called The Park and we’d go there after games. I was a lightweight and would go home but Bryan Robson, Norman Whiteside and Paul McGrath, they’d stay out. It didn’t affect them.
‘Liverpool won everything in the 70s and 80s, and they had the biggest drinking team in the country.
‘But they stopped serving alcohol in the players’ lounge when Fergie came in. He wanted to show the lads coming through, “Don’t be like that lot. Cut it out”.
‘He was coming in to discipline the team. The players were a bit shaken by it. You could see he was going to change all the old ones, and filter them out. He brought in Archie Knox who was a sergeant major type. He didn’t smile much. I could see it was going to change.’
Barnes witnessed the first blast of Ferguson’s hairdryer in his fourth game in charge, a 1-0 defeat by Wimbledon at Plough Lane. The manager’s mood wasn’t helped by the Crazy Gang’s antics. ‘The dressing room was a tip,’ says Barnes. ‘They’d put two inches of water on the dressing-room floor and salt in the tea urn. Fergie took one sip and spat it out.
‘I came off for Bryan Robson early in the second half and spent the last 25 minutes in the bath waiting for the team to come in.
‘Gordon Strachan tells the story that I hid in the bath when Fergie came in, but there was only a few inches of water in it. I got out to go round Fergie to the corner peg, and he booted the door behind me which was already hanging off its hinges and almost fell down. His face was bright red.
‘He went round the whole changing room screaming at them, from Gary Bailey, the keeper. He said he wasn’t accepting it and we had to wear the shirt with pride. Do it my way or you’re up the road.
‘He went up to Sivebaek right in his face. He says, “You better learn how to defend in this country or you’re on the next f***ing boat back to Denmark”.
‘ The players were under no illusions after that, but I wasn’t there long enough to see it.’
Barnes rejoined City, although it was a very different club to the one he had left eight years earlier, short of money and starved of success.
He ended his career with a flurry of clubs in Portugal, Australia, Malta, America and Ireland, with spells in the English non-League.
Aged 60, and now a grandfather of two, Barnes is still playing for — and organising — City’s veterans team in charity matches. The blond hair is greying now, the blue eyes a little paler, but he’s still in great shape and great company.
‘We play 35 minutes each way and still raise a few quid for charity. Every two years, we go to Benidorm,’ says Barnes, who works in hospitality at the Etihad and still has an involvement in his father’s soccer schools in Malaysia.
‘My old man always told me to play until my legs dropped off. Well, mine dropped off 15 years ago, but I’m still out there because I love being with the lads and putting my boots on.’
‘Bestie had his tea then played cricket with us in the street’ ‘Dad told Bobby Charlton: “Buy your own bloody fags!”’