THE FAMILY GUY
Glory days under legendary managers Kendall and Busby
THE game is accelerating at such a pace that the modest giants on whose shoulders it stands seem to be receding into the background. Many of a newer generation would not even recognise the deep North Lanarkshire drawl of Sir Matt Busby. It’s why the lavish footage of him in a new biopic, Busby which premieres this week, feels such a precious commodity.
The film has no great revelations, though none are necessary. It is a searing experience simply to watch Busby, his face creased with pain in close-up, describing the way his wife, Jean, told him which of his young players had died in the Munich Disaster.
Not long out of unconsciousness himself after suffering unspeakable injuries, Busby resorted to naming the players, one-by-one.
If they had survived, his wife was to nod. If not, she would shake her head.
‘Tragic loss,’ Busby reflects, barely audible as he reflects upon this. ‘Tragic loss.’
The fundamental humanity which equipped him to build United was well known to those who had crossed his path before he walked through the doors of Old Trafford in 1945.
A young Bob Paisley struggled desperately with homesickness and a lack ck of confidence when he arrived at Anfield as a player in 1939 and it was Busby, then Liverpool captain, who helped him find his bearings.
Busby knew about insecurity when arriving at Manchester
City as a young man. ‘I had a complex at the time,’ he says in one of the film’s early clips. ‘I think it was a form of inferiority complex.’
Paisley frequently spoke of his kindness.
Busby’s vision that United could become ‘ a family’, as one of the film’s contributors puts it, and recruit young players who would bind it was an extraordinary one.
No manager had considered such a notion, let alone had the temerity to want to enact it.
His paternalism was underpinned by the same magnetic hold over players that his compatriot and contemporary Bill Shankly displayed at Liverpool — a capacity to ‘ zero in on you and know which buttons to press’ as Paddy Crerand says in the film.
Yet Busby brought more intellect than Shankly, less talk and less raw emotion.
‘There was no lilting rhetoric or heated condemnation in Manchester United’s dressingroom,’ Eamon Dunphy writes in his stellar biography of Busby, A
Strange Kind of Glory. ‘Words were not his means of inspiring others or rebuking them.’ His capacity for leadership owed much to mystique — the elusive force that players imagined lay behind the genial exterior — as well as an innate ability to spot great players and combine them to make great teams.
The legendary paternalism has obscured Busby’s lesser known unflinching and sometimes brutal toughness, to which Ole Gunnar Solskjaer might pay heed.
The film provides passing reference to Johnny Morris, who was infuriated by a refusal to pay him more than the sport’s maximum wage, let that be known and stormed off a training field when Busby consigned him to the reserves. BBusbyb repairedid tto hihis office and calmly called the Press Association to say that Morris had been transfer-listed.
The first the player heard of it was when journalists called him. He never played for United again.
These were the management traits of a winner, who led United for 24 years in his principal, glorious managerial spell, rebuilding the devastated club to lift the European Cup at Wembley in 1968, 10 years on from Munich.
Yet it was letting go that he struggled with and, you have to say, was a failing, just as it had been with Shankly at Liverpool.
The film makes little direct reference to how ill-advised this was. It iis a piecei off iiconography, h after all.
But it does convey the chaos which ensued in the years after 1968 when managers Wi l f McGuiness and Frank O’Farrell tried and failed to succeed the man who remained a shadow on their office wall.
A TV journalist asks Busby at the time if this was due to interference on his part. ‘I can’t understand it,’ the Scot replies. Another asks if the board partly to blame for United’s poor results? ‘I don’t think so,’ Busby says.
The complete picture is provided by Dunphy, whose book relates how McGuiness’s title was ‘chief coach’ — ostensibly to ‘protect him from the media’ — while Busby remained general manager.
McGuiness ‘ was completely unprepared,’ Dunphy writes.
‘He wasn’t sure of anything. Busby had defined the modern manager’s role. Now he redefined it to create in the club he’d made great the kind of circumstances for his successor which he would never have tolerated.’
If anything O’Farrell had the worst of it. Busby encouraged the board to transfer-list George Best — against O’Farrell’s wishes.
He contributed to a U-turn on that decision, which O’Farrell learned about from journalists.
He supported the temporary marginalisation of the Manchester
Evening News’ respected United correspondent, David Meek, who was cold-shouldered and banned from travelling to games on the team coach for writing an article supportive of O’Farrell.
The manager was treated shabbily. His last dealings were the court case in which he settled for £45,000 severance pay. Busby never contacted him again.
United were relegated to the second tier two years later and, in words as relevant to these days as to those, Bobby Charlton reflects in one piece of footage that the club had grown complacent about their place at the top of the game.
The problems, Charlton says, ‘stem from the fact that we were on top for so long. Unless you’re in a position where you recognise you need to change, you are going to fail.’
• BUSBY is screening now at selected cinemas and is on sale on DVD and Blu-ray.