There has been a lot of talk in England these past few weeks of what happened on the football field 60 years ago. So much so that an anniversary from 10 years earlier has rather slipped through the net, for to paraphrase The Beatles, it was 70 years ago today that Matt Busby taught the rest to play…
This summer we sit neatly between two golden seasons of First Division football, two campaigns that took the English game out of its prevailing pre-war mentality and into a word of thrilling modernity. The national side had suffered humiliation at the hands of the USA in the World Cup in 1950, then again when they had been shredded by the Hungarians at Wembley in 1953, but in spite of that, a lot of meat and potatoes football was still very much on the menu in the First Division. Tottenham’s intricate push and run title winners of 1951 had begun to hint at a new way, but it was Manchester United, with their back-to-back title wins of 1955/56 and 1956/57, that really showed the new way forward.
Rebuilding United from the ruins of Old Trafford at the end of World War Two, Matt Busby and his assistant Jimmy Murphy initially had to rely on experienced pros like Johnny Carey, Allenby Chilton, Stan Pearson and Jack Rowley, fine players who helped them win the FA Cup in 1948 and the First Division four years later having finished runners up four times in the previous five seasons. But there was also a long-term master plan too, that United would grow their own team, schooled in the United way, full of thrilling young players who would become masters of a new approach.
The arrival of the FA Youth Cup in 1952/53 showed just how successfully this plan was coming along as United won the first five finals. But as the subsequent years have shown, it’s a long way from impressing in youth football to being able to take on the English top-flight. But with Jimmy Murphy teaching and cajoling, and Matt Busby willing to live by the adage of ‘if they’re good enough, they’re old enough’, all the encouragement this new group needed was there. After all, this was an era before anybody was telling you that you’d win nothing with kids.
After winning that league title in 1951/52, the transition began in earnest as United finished eighth, fourth, fifth. As that 1954/55 season ended, Roger Byrne was 25, Bill Foulkes and Tommy Taylor 23, Jacie Blanchflower 22, Dennis Viollet and Mark Jones 21, Billy Whelan 20, David Pegg and Albert Scanlon 19, Duncan Edwards just 18. The vast majority had come through the youth system, and they were about to be joined by more youthful brilliance in Eddie Colman. The Busby Babes were ready to take the First Division by storm.
Eight games into 1955/56 and it was a stuttering start, three won, three lost. But from there, United hit their straps and would lose just four times all season. They became an irresistible force in both senses of the term, both unstoppable and a team that you could not help falling in love with. They had the power that was so necessary in English football, but they had the wit, the invention, the pace, the trickery, the sheer impudence that captivated supporters across the country.
They couldn’t stop scoring goals, 25 for Tommy Taylor, described by Welsh international Graham Williams as, ‘The nearest thing you could see to Marco van Basten’, and 20 for Dennis Viollet. Duncan Edwards and Eddie Colman swiftly became the finest midfield pairing in the country, Roger Byrne skippered the side with intelligence, Busby and Murphy gave them their heads when they could, reined them in when they had to.
United went unbeaten in their last 14 games, winning 10 and simply destroying the rest of the division as they did so. They ended the season with 83 goals from 42 games, 60 points, and won the league with an 11-point gap to their nearest chasers, Blackpool and Wolves. It was a magnificent display of thrilling, attacking football that saw every ground in the country filled to bursting when they were in town.
Winning the league meant qualification for the European Cup too. Chelsea had been refused permission to play in the inaugural competition a year before, but the visionary Busby was having none of that, insisting that England had to compete and that United were going. He got his way.
In 1956/57, United were 12 games unbeaten at the start, extending their league run to 26 games, already laying waste to the competition. Another young genius by the name of Bobby Charlton had been added to the side by now, and United simply got better and better and better. Ireland’s Billy Whelan really came to the fore in this season too, having joined from Home Farm in 1953. He scored 26 goals in the First Division, 33 in all, Taylor weighed in with 34 in total, 22 in the First Division, Violett had 16 league goals and 26 across the board. How could you stop that kind of onslaught?
Domestically, the Busby Babes defended their title in style, collecting an additional four points to finish on 64 this time, and with 103 goals. The 20th century’s first league and cup double looked assured as United lined up to play Aston Villa at Wembley, but six minutes in, goalkeeper Ray Wood was injured in a collision with Villa’s Peter McParland, breaking his cheekbone. No subs in those days, so Jackie Blanchflower had to take his pace between the sticks and United were reduced to ten men. Wood eventually reemerged as a passenger on the wing, before going back in goal for the last seven minutes when Taylor’s goal brought it back to 2-1 and gave United a sliver of a chance that they could not take. To add insult to literal injury, both Villa goals came from McParland.
In the European Cup, despite having to play the first three home ties at Maine Road as Old Trafford had floodlights installed, United dismissed Anderlecht 12-0, Borussia Dortmund 3-2 and Athletic Bilbao 6-5 on the way to a semi-final with Real Madrid. Beaten 3-1 in Spain, United could only manage a 2-2 draw at home, but they had clearly developed a taste for the competition.
1957/58 saw United carry on from where they had left off. Impressive in the league, on February 5 1958, they had qualified for the semi-final of the European Cup where they would meet Real Madrid again. Already through to the fifth round of the FA Cup, might the Busby Babes go on to do the treble?
In a parallel universe, it is Manchester United who went on to dominate the early years of the European Cup, it is young Duncan Edwards who thrilled the world at the World Cup in 1958, Edwards who collected the Jules Rimet trophy for England in 1966. But all of those hopes and dreams were destroyed in the snows of Munich the following afternoon, February 6, a glorious vision of a football team lost before it had ever reached its peak. To those who saw the Busby Babes, that team remained vivid in the mind’s eye forever and history has cast a strange kind of immortality over them all, for that team will never be forgotten, even if - perhaps because - so little of their work was captured on film.
‘United will go on…’ was the message on the front of United Review for the side’s first game after the tragedy, and of course it did. Ten years on from Munich, Matt Busby, Bobby Charlton, Bill Foulkes delivered the European Cup not just to the Club, but to the memory of their fallen colleagues. There have been bigger glories yet since then, but has Manchester United ever had a greater team, a team that meant so much and enchanted so many since the Busby Babes?