‘What United need is a team-bonding session’
Robson, who features in a new film, fears players now are too scared of upsetting each other – not like in his day
⮞bryan
When Manchester United play Watford this afternoon, there is one name every fan of the club would love to see on the teamsheet: Bryan Robson.
“He went into battle for the club,” is how Gary Neville puts it in an interview for Robbo, a new documentary film about the career of a man who captained United on more occasions than anyone else. Watching Robson, as he joins in a training session with United’s under-18s at the club’s historic training ground The Cliff, even now he looks as if he might make a better fist of things than some of the current team. And he is 64.
“Aye, I’d love to be playing against Watford,” he smiles when the thought is put to him. “People say, ‘Do you think at your peak you could play these days?’ Sure I could. People talk about fitness, but stamina-wise I’d back myself against anyone in today’s game. Only thing is, maybe they’d be a bit quicker.”
Watching the film, with its footage of Robson at full throttle for West Bromwich Albion, United and England, is to see someone who radiated competitiveness. Every tackle was ferocious, every shot a hammer blow, every pass a beauty. But what is most evident is the way he leads. During any game he played he never stopped issuing instructions. He was, he says, always like that.
“At school I was a bit of a gob----on the pitch,” he says, as he sits in the Cliff ’s canteen, beneath pictures of the Busby Babes. “The amount of times I’d get told off by the teachers for having a go at a team-mate or going, ‘Referee, that’s never a freekick’. My mother used to say she didn’t know where it came from, because off the pitch I was quiet and unassuming. Soon as I got on the field though... [he does a mime of a bomb exploding].” Such an approach never left him.
“What I always try to say to people is, ‘Listen, I’m not having a go at you just to have a go at you. I’m doing it to try to make you better and us as a group better’. I don’t know why it is, but I don’t see that any more. Players just don’t do it. It’s like they’re scared of upsetting each other.” In his United heyday there was no such fear.
“We had our major success at this football club with players like Peter Schmeichel, Steve Bruce, Paul Ince, Roy Keane, Eric Cantona: all of them had opinions. We had some right rows in the dressing room at half-time. Sometimes it was great for Sir Alex [Ferguson], he’d just stand back, let us get on with it, have a cup of tea and grin. And then he’d step in and say, ‘Right you’ve had your opinion, now listen to me’.”
There was something else Robson used to organise as captain, that he believes would benefit the current United squad: team-bonding sessions. “That came from my West Brom days. We’d have a few drinks and it would always turn into football talk and then people bring out things they wouldn’t have said if they hadn’t had a pint. Things that needed being said. I remember once at United, when results were going against us, I said to Sir Alex, ‘Right, I’m taking them all down the pub’. He said, ‘OK, as long as I don’t read about it in the papers tomorrow’. “Schmeichel and Andrei Kanchelskis didn’t drink and said, ‘We’re not coming’. I said, ‘Yeah you are, you’re part of the team’. But no, they refused. So I persuaded Sir Alex to let me fine them. He loved that idea. I told them they’d be fined £100 each if they didn’t join the rest of us. And surprise, surprise they both came.
“Andrei said he had half a lager, then he had another half, then another – I lost count. All of a sudden he starts yelling at me, pointing at me. Everyone’s killing themselves
‘Once, when things were going against us, I said, right I’m taking them all down the pub’
because about the only English he knows is the ‘F’ word. But he is getting things off his chest. And you know what: we won the next game.”
When asked if this approach would help the current team bond, he said: “Yes definitely.”
It was not just with United his leadership qualities showed. In the film, Gary Lineker suggests that had Robson not succumbed to injury in the 1986 and 1990 World Cups, England might have won one of them.
“People are always telling me I’d have tackled Maradona before he went on his run in ’86,” he says. “Well, we’ll never know. In 1990, though, going to Italy I felt really good coming out of the FA Cup final.
I was well up for it. Playing in the centre with Gazza, we had a good understanding that might have worked well. But then in the second game I snapped my Achilles.
“I actually did the semi-final on the BBC with Jimmy Hill and Terry Venables. People say I’m miserable at the best of times. You should have seen me that night. It’s just devastating to sit and watch the game when you could have been part of it.”
Despite the injuries, he played on until he was nearly 40. And after that he enjoyed a highly successful spell as a manager, at Middlesbrough and West Brom. Though he says he nursed no ambition to manage at Old Trafford. “When I went to Boro, I never had United in my thoughts. All I was concentrating on was doing a job for them. People said, ‘You’ll take over from Sir Alex one day’. But I left United in ’94 and he stayed for another 19 years. If I’d been hanging around waiting I’d have had a long white beard by the time he went.”
His last managerial job with the Thailand national team ended when he contracted throat cancer. Now in remission, he has no intention of returning to the dugout. “I miss a lot about being a manager,” he says. “Being out there with the boys. I miss wheeling and dealing in the transfer market. What I don’t miss are the hassles, keeping 60-70 players happy, and doing the media every day. And if the results don’t go for you, you get hammered, no matter what your budget. When I got offered another job after I’d finished, I thought, ‘What do I need this for?’ After my illness, I want to spend time with my kids, with my grandchildren. You never get that chance as a manager.”
What United fans remember are his performances in games such as the 1983 FA Cup final against Brighton or the 1985 FA Cup semifinal against Liverpool, when he steered United to victory by sheer force of personality. Though he reckons his finest game for the club was in the 1991 European Cup-winners’ Cup final against Barcelona. “It’s the only game I played in that I’ve ever watched back in full. Brian Mcclair, when he was head of academy, used to sit the 17s and 18s down in front of that game and tell them to watch me. ‘Desire, quality and the will to win, this performance has it all,’ he’d tell them. Which was very nice to hear.”
Desire, quality and the will to win: how United could do with him today.
“Robbo: The Bryan Robson Story” , available on DVD, Blu-ray and digital download from Nov 29. Pre-orders from Amazon, Appletv and Skystore.