Edwards cheated death twice in one day

HOW Edwards survived two miraculous brushes with death on the very same day WHEN AWAY FOR AN ENGLAND B INTERNATIONAL...

“On the second leg of the flight from Brussels to Bucharest, the pilot apparently got a little off course,” Ronnie Clayton said. “We didn’t know this at the time, but we did get a shock when one of the players exclaimed: ‘Look – out of the window!’ And – only a couple of yards away, it seemed – we saw another aircraft, bearing on its fuselage a red star. Tracer bullets began to zip across the nose of our aircraft.

“Suddenly the MiG (MikoyanGurevich, a Soviet fighter aircraft) shot beneath our plane – and we zoomed upwards. We must have missed a midair collision by inches.

“Dunc and I, as usual, were sitting next to each other, towards the rear of the plane. Dunc turned to me and, in a voice which sounded strangely unlike his own, said: ‘You don’t look so good.’

“In a faint voice I managed to answer: ‘Neither do you.’ I felt like being sick. And from the look of him Dunc’s stomach was tied in knots, too. We felt even worse when seconds later the MiG appeared again, zooming above and below us.

“It seemed uncomfortably close, and someone suggested that the pilot was trying to force us to land. But our own pilot wasn’t having any. Calmly, he spoke to us over the intercom: ‘There’s no need to worry.’ And he kept an even keel and stayed steadfastly on course.

“For 15 minutes that MiG tried everything to shake us out of our steady flight and as we sweated through the whole ghastly performance it seemed like 15 hours.

“Suddenly the ordeal was over. The ‘enemy’ plane had vanished. And we breathed again.”

“This would have been a traumatic event for anyone, and yet, it was not Duncan’s last brush with death on this day. On the evening in Bucharest, some players went to the circus, where Ronnie remembered how Duncan had, “for the second time within a matter of hours... escaped death by inches”.

He said: “His seat was near the spot where the animals entered the arena. I was sitting next to him, and felt somewhat relieved, too, when he suggested that we should move a few yards farther from the entrance.

“It was a good job he decided to make that move. For if he had stayed in his original seat he would have been crushed to death. For a giant spotlight toppled from its mast above the area and crashed – smack into the seat where Dunc had been sitting.

“That seat was splintered into hundreds of pieces – and if Dunc (top) had stayed there’s no doubt he would have been crushed to a pulp.”