Giles Oakley has offered us some more insight to United of days gone by, looking at the best ’street-fighters’ at United, in two parts.
I have often wondered if I am the only person who witnessed both of the two most spectacular match-day assaults ever perpetrated by Manchester United players on spectators, explosively sudden moments of violence which occured with a 35 year interval between them and which had markedly different impacts on the players concerned, and on the club. The term is over-used, but in both cases true United Legends were involved, heroes to me then – and now – and the memories of these dramatic occurrences remain as vivid today as when they happened.
Here I want to concentrate on the earlier event, because it’s long ago and largely forgotten, but also because in telling the tale in some detail it’s possible to give a picture of what it was like to be a United fan around half a century ago. Some will have no interest in such things, but for me supporting United is inseparable from understanding the club’s complex history, which can include uncomfortable truths about those we revere. I wish when I began supporting the Red Devils I’d had access to detailed memories of fans from 50 years previously, which would have meant from before World War One, so I hope the younger readers among you will find something here to forge a deeper link to United’s past, and for older folks maybe there’s a memory or two to share.
But first, if there are any others out there who witnessed both assaults, let’s hear from you…
There are no prizes for guessing that the more recent incident involved Eric Cantona’s astonishing kung-fu kick at Crystal Palace in January 1995, when I had a perfect view from the Selhurst Park stand of how he felled his antagonist with one rather elegant studs-up leap.Eventually there was some sort of ban on showing the TV pictures of that martial arts moment, apparently for fear of ‘bringing the game into disrepute’, but initially the clip was re-played on TV so many times it felt like we’d all been kicked into submission on the point that this was absolutely unprecedented and the worst such crime by a player in football history.
I disputed that view at the time, as I will come to in due course, but first I want to explore what happened one mild Spring afternoon in Luton on Saturday 9th April 1960, which indeed shows that Eric was not the first to fell a fan.
By that time I had been a United supporter for just over two years, having been drawn in by the Munich Air Disaster of 6th February 1958, when 21 passengers died, including 8 United players. The crash had an enormous and enduring emotional impact on me (See my Following United:50 Years of Disappointment), and as I found out more about what happened on that tragic day and got to know the individuals who had lived or died, one man stood out in a very remarkable way, the goalkeeper Harry Gregg. Much to his own embarrassment, it is widely acknowledged that he was genuinely a hero in a way that far transcends the normal casual use of the word for sporting idols. Harry was the first to plunge back into the wrecked and burning aircraft, rescuing a crying baby, then the child’s grievously injured mother, before then dragging players Bobby Charlton and Dennis Viollet clear, all at enormous personal risk. It is also now well known that Harry has suffered classic ’survivor guilt’ for the half century since the crash, as you can tell from the haunted look in his eyes at times,even now. For instance, for 40 years he could not bring himself to speak to relatives of the dead players, such as Joy, the widow of United skipper Roger Byrne, an inspirational leader whose dead but visibly unharmed body Harry had seen on the runway, draped across the deadfully injured Jackie Blanchflower, a friend from his youth in Northern Ireland. It anguishes him to this day that he didn’t close Roger’s eyes for him. Throughout those succeeding decades Harry had bottled up deep feelings of guilt that he survived when others like Roger didn’t. It’s also very likely he has suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which can lead to depression, mood swings and barely repressed anger, effects which were little known or understood in the 1950s and to some extent even now. Post War generations were still expected to show stiff upper lips. Expressions of grief could be seen as ‘unmanly’, tears as signs of weakness.
All this background needs to be borne in mind that day in Luton, some two years after the crash.
By that time Harry was certainly my hero in the traditional, sporting sense too. I had pictures of him on my bedroom wall, alongside all the other Munich survivors such as Billy Foulkes, Dennis Viollet, Bobby Charlton and an incongruously beaming Albert Scanlon, mainly colour snaps from Charles Buchan’s ‘Football Monthly’. There are some wonderful photos of Harry in the glorious FA Cup run in the weeks after the crash, when United reached the final but were beaten 2-0 by Bolton, when, as one still bitterly recalls, Nat Lofthouse ‘got two goals and a goalkeeper’, knocking Harry out as he scored with a ruthless barge that most observers ( including me, aged 12 ) regarded as a blatant foul. There were many other fabulous leaping, diving, tipping-over, scrambling, blocking, punching photos of Harry throughout his career, including pictures from the 1958 World Cup when he helped Northern Ireland reach the semi-finals, and was voted Best Goalkeeper in the competition. Sadly that was the only thing he was to win in his career, apart from his loser’s medal from Wembley in ‘58. Manager Matt Busby had bought Harry from Doncaster Rovers for a then world record fee for a ‘keeper of £23,000 in late 1957, to strengthen the Babes who ‘d won the (original) Championship for the previous two seasons, but had run into a poor patch of form. Gregg was agile and athletic, going up fearlessly – even recklessly – to punch the ball away from the heads of in-rushing centre forwards, in the days when, as we’ve seen, goalies got no protection from refs, frequently ‘cleaning out’ his own defenders as he went for the ball.He came out of his goal much more than most, sometimes even outside his area to head the ball away like a centre-half, often still wearing his trademark cap. I wasn’t a goalkeeper myself, except in emergencies, but I’d always have a little rubber ball in my pocket, ready to whip out to practice with, indoors or out, kicking and heading it, followed by full-stretch, Harry-style fingertip dives to ’save’ rebounds, with breathlessly whispered running commentaries, ‘And Gregg makes another impossible save…’ . He used to wear his stylish crew-neck green sweater with the sleeves hitched or rolled half way up the fore-arms, as if permanently coiled for action, so of course I had to follow suit, whether or not I was wearing a goalie’s jersey. That’s the kind of hero Harry was to me aged 14 in 1960.
However, despite having supported United for over two years, by April 1960 I had only seen the team and Harry in the flesh once before, a couple of weeks earlier at Fulham, when United won 5-0 ( a margin I didn’t see them achieve again for years), with two goals by Dennis Viollet, breaking the club record for league goals in a season in the process. Now in the Easter holidays I was going to see my heroes again, against Luton Town, although, much to my disappointment Bobby Charlton wouldn’t be playing as he was away on international duty for England in a ‘Home International’ against Scotland at Hampden Park. Other favourites were also out injured, such as Viollet and the magical (if inconsistent) ‘golden boy’, Albert Quixall and the ‘ball-playing’ Mark ‘Pancho’ Pearson, whose side-burns I persistently tried to emulate, much to the annoyance of the teachers at my rugby playing school, who had no more liking for ‘teddy boy’ footballers than for my rock ‘n’ roll heroes. The brief sympathy they’d shown for my emotional involvement in the last dying days of Duncan Edwards after the Crash had evaporated by then.Indeed, public sympathy for the stricken United and the traumatised survivors had long gone as well, replaced by envy and a barely disguised desire to see them brought low.
Luton had reached the FA Cup Final the season before, in 1959, playing functional football under skipper Syd Owen, a tough and nobbly centre half who was now their proverbially ‘tight-lipped and ashen faced’ manager. They had been beaten at Wembley by Nottingham Forest, and had been on the slide ever since, and now faced a desperate struggle to avoid relegation. I’d been to Kenilworth Road earlier in the season,in the autumn, to see Manchester City and the great Bert Trautmann. I had no liking for City, even then, and wanted Luton to win (they lost 2-1) but partisanship was less embittered in those days and I loved seeing great players, whoever they played for, and Bert was one of the greatest ‘keepers I’ve ever seen. Not as good as Gregg, of course, but pretty good, none the less.
Knowing there would be a full house for United, as there usually was, even at the end of a season of mid-table mediocrity, I got to Kenilworth Road early. At most grounds in those days there were few stand tickets on sale in advance so it was first-come, first-served , usually after long queueing, to stand on the terraces which at some stadiums such as Stamford Bridge,could be an intimidating experience. You could get great surges in the crowd, pushing and cascading fans helplessly forward down the steeply sloping steps, followed by a heaving backlash movement as supporters tried to re-gain lost ground in some vast convulsive Darwinian struggle. Kenilworth Road was quite small, holding something over 20,000 spectators at that time, and was not as not as bad as some, but I still wanted to get there early enough to bag a place in front of one of the iron rails dotted around the terracing, which at least gave one protection from the massive pushing from behind.
As usual,I sat there skimming the papers before kick-off, and I remember reading extensive coverage of the Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa, which had happened a couple of weeks earlier, when at least 69 black protesters against the white-supremacist Apartheid regime were mown down and killed by the police, with over 180 others injured. Most of the bullet wounds were in the backs of demonstrators, undermining the police claims that they were firing in ’self-defence’. The killings shocked and enraged me, and were part of the very long process by which world opinion was at long last turned against the racist regime. You might think, what’s this got to do with football or United? Well, I believed even then that the values by which society should be governed can be embodied in how sport is conducted. I burned with anger at what was happening in Africa -and to Civil Rights activists in the USA – and I dreamed of the time when United might become a multi-racial force for good in the world (Why not Pele at Old Trafford??) It’s been one of the happier aspects of supporting United that such a dream has in many ways come to fruition in my lifetime. It was a wonderful moment of vindication when United toured in South Africa a few years ago and were introduced to a beaming Nelson Mandela (who’d been imprisonned not long after Sharpeville). He made it clear he was a big fan of United and Ryan Giggs in particular (himself the child of a mixed marriage). A wonderful moment, not least because United had become a genuinely multi-ethnic team by the 1990s.(My brother was in South Africa a few years ago for the African Cup of Nations and he was lucky enough to find himself in the same room as Mandela. ‘It was like being in the presence of an angel,’ he told me.)
Anyway, back to Luton in 1960. Apart from reading the ’serious’ papers before the game as I sat on the crude concrete terraces, casting my eyes round the somewhat shabby stadium , I will have taken about two minutes to read the match programme (which I still have), a thin publication even by the less overblown standards of the time. I would have also been carefully clutching my ‘Souvenir Editions’ of the London evening papers. Every Saturday the mid-day editions of the Star , News and Standard had outer wrap pages covered in photos and preview comment on all the matches in and around London, the News being printed in green. Gregg was fit after missing a few games for United, having figured in an international for Northern Ireland in midweek, coming through unscathed despite losing 3-2 to Wales. Luton’s forceful winger Billy Bingham, a good pal of Harry’s, had scored one of the Irish goals. The big news was that a hopeful young reserve, Norbert Lawton, aged 20, would be making his debut for United, which sort of made up for the missing Bobby Charlton. Then, as now, I loved to see youngsters coming through the reserve team ranks. The fact that almost none of you reading this will remember ‘Nobby ‘ Lawton reveals the sad fact that he was another kid who didn’t quite fulfill his potential.Not a bad player, but not good enough for United, although he managed a respectable 40-odd appearances for the team before moving on to Preston.
As it happens, Nobby did well on his debut, although it was another youngster who really caught the eye, a stocky inside -forward called Johnny Giles. I’d been following his career for some time, as maybe the best of the next generation of ‘Busby Babes’. He’d made his debut the previous September in a disastrous 5-1 defeat against Spurs at Old Trafford, but even then he’d made an impression. I’d seen him score his first goal for United at Fulham, and he was obviously someone who could handle himself. He produced one of the most breathtaking pieces of skill I’ve ever seen in this match against Luton, in an unimportant moment, in no-man’s land, surrounded by hardened opponents desperate to avoid the drop into Division 2. A ball came flying out of defence, from which side doesn’t matter, in no particular direction, at around head height. Giles (I like the sound of this sentence) leapt up and at full stretch cushioned the ball on his instep and somehow ‘floated’ down to ground as if in slow motion, with the ball still ‘glued’ to his foot . As centre-half Dave Pacey came clattering in on him, he deftly side stepped his man and popped off an inch-perfect pass out to his winger, good old Albert Scanlon. It’s a bit like the moment I described in my account of ‘The First Time I Saw Denis Law Play for United’, this was nothing in itself, probably unseen by most people there, leading to nothing, and yet it was magic to me. I spent ages in my back garden trying to replicate the manoeuvre, with little success. Older readers of course will be fully aware that Giles fell out with manager Matt Busby (I don’t like the sound of this sentence), despite figuring in United’s FA Cup victory at Wembley against Leicester City in 1963 (For more on that match, see my The Best Goal I Saw Denis Law score). He was sold to Leeds United, then floundering in the second division, but on the verge of the greatest period in their history under Don ‘Mr Fivers’ Revie. Like most United fans I despised that Leeds team, with whom Giles was the midfield hub, the man through whom almost everything happened. When he joined Leeds I was heart-broken, having followed his youthful career so closely hitherto. What made it sadder was the way his skillful qualities got somewhat submerged under the cynical and – to my mind – dirty playing he indulged in, like too many of his Leeds team-mates. I like to think if Busby hadn’t made such a terrible mistake, for such it was, in selling Giles, the player would not have been allowed to let that nasty side become so prominent. Johnny became frustrated that Busby kept playing him out on the right wing when he was truly a great ’scheming’ inside forward. I thought Giles was right, and it was one of Busby’s worst mistakes in the ’60s.
By now, after all these digressions,you’ll be wondering when we’re going to get to the violence, and how Harry Gregg was involved. First let’s quickly say that United actually won quite easily, 3-2, a margin that did scant justice to United’s superiority. The fact that the result wasn’t more emphatic was sadly down in part to our hero, Harry Gregg. And that no doubt helped lead to the explosion when it came.
United took an early lead with an excellent 20-yarder from Warren Bradley, the fast and direct right-winger who was more committed to his career as a teacher then as a footballer, yet who played a couple of times with success for England.(He had a mildly ‘Alfred E. Neuman’ look , with his round face and ‘jug’ ears, but he was a nippy little wide-man, and I always liked him). Then came Gregg’s first error, when he was caught badly out of position at a free kick, enabling Luton to score an undeserved equaliser. Goals direct from free-kicks were much rarer in those days,mainly because the leather-panelled balls were much heavier , especially in wet weather when they soaked up the rain, as I can recall from heading balls in that condition. It was not unlike nutting a sand-bag. The balls were much less prone to dip and swerve in the way a David Beckham or Cristiano Ronaldo can routinely achieve nowadays, so Gregg’s positional misjudgment stood out embarrassingly for a goalkeeper of his class and experience.Fortunately the muscular Scottish centre forward Alex Dawson then scored a couple of classy goals to put United comfortably back in front. Dawson had been plunged into the deep end by Munich, helping the team get to the Bolton Cup Final, in which he played his heart out, but looked a little lost.However against Luton he was at his best and his first goal was a bit of a gem. He controlled a pass, flicked it up and volleyed it home ferociously from distance past the ‘despairing’ Luton keeper Ron Baynham (In those days football was full of Rons, three more playing for England that day, plus Ronnie Cope for United at centre half.) I always liked Dawson, with his saturnine dark looks and combative energy. He always seemed to score when I saw him, and I was sorry when he too moved on to Preston.
So, with United comfortably ahead 3-1 it should have been all over, until Harry’s next mistake.He feebly fumbled a speculative long shot and Luton got an easy tap-in, raising their hopes right to the end, and giving United some needless nervy moments. It was a relief for the cluster of United fans scattered round the stadium when the final whistle came and United had a creditable away win. For the Luton supporters of course, this was another disastrous result, and all they could do was vent their disappointment on the ‘over-rated’ hero of Munich. There was a depressed and resigned mood among the Luton fans, with a few jeering and sneering at the United players as they left the field exchanging handshakes with their defeated opponents.
As everyone started heading for the exits I happened to turn round to watch my idols as they left the field. I was at the far end but the famous red shirts, with the ‘Busby Babe’ V-necks, held a special attraction for me, and I was savouring every moment, it all being so new to me.I’d seen United in the flesh, and they’d won. Hooray! (Or even, ‘Wizard!’) Then suddenly I was astonished to see the green jerseyed figure of Harry Gregg launch a massive punch into the face of one of the many fans who’d run onto the pitch. The man went down as if poleaxed. Suddenly everyone was gasping, ‘Did you see that!’ ‘That was Gregg, wasn’t it?’ ‘Did he just hit that man?” What’s going on?’ . Then opinion turned nasty, ‘Typical bloody United, think they can get away with anything” ‘Yeah, they think they’re above the law’, ‘They’re all teddy-boys, they’ve got no discipline’, and so forth. With ever louder booing in his ears Gregg was hurried away from the pitch by team-mates, led by the skipper, Maurice Setters, himself a bit of a hard-man. Police could be seen heading towards the pitch and someone helped the felled spectator to his feet, clutching his face. All the participants in this extraordinary scene were quickly moved out of the public gaze, and those of us still left on the terraces could do nothing but guess what had happened. I was shocked. This was one of the people I most respected in all the world and he’d done something outrageous. This was not what I expected from United players. I wanted them to uphold the finest traditions of the club, not to start throwing punches at people.Surely there must be some reason for him to hit a fan like that, but what was it?
So as I left Kenilworth Road with the crowd buzzing with talk of Harry Gregg, no-one really knew quite what had happened. I knew I’d almost certainly have to wait until the next day for the newspapers for more details of what I’d just witnessed. What made Harry punch this man as if getting revenge on a Nat Lofthouse?
Of course, when Eric Cantona kung-fued his man in 1995, there were countless TV replays on every channel, and the case attracted news coverage for weeks and months, de-stabilising the club for the rest of the season and into the next. As it happens however, if something like Eric’s assault happened today the coverage worldwide would be even more massive and frenetic, right round the world, so much has changed in the media landscape even in those 14 years. But that’s nothing to the difference between now and 50 years ago. It was a very different world then.Back in 1960 there were only two TV channels, BBC and ITV, and only 3 radio channels, all BBC, none devoted to sport, and of course there was no Ceefax or Internet and none of the other modern sources of instant information, no ‘trannies’, no mobile phones, and most regrettable of all, no blogs, no Republik of Mancunia to provide mature and measured analysis. There was hardly any TV coverage of football and Match of the Day did not yet exist, although the BBC did sometimes include short ‘telerecordings’ of football matches on their Saturday Night ‘Sports Special’, providing occasional glimpses of my favourites, such as when United had beaten Liverpool 3-1 at Anfield in the FA Cup back in January. On the evening of the Luton confrontation however,I knew they would be concentrating on England’s 1-1 draw with Scotland (Bobby Charlton scored a penalty, but failed with two other attempts, one a re-take). Sure enough, no pictures of Gregg and his powerful fists, no mention of the incident. I knew I’d have to wait till the next day for the newspapers.In those days there were more titles available, including long forgotten names such as the Sunday Pictorial or Reynold’s News, and in general newspaper readership was much larger than now, not just for tabloids but across the range, and although at the time it didn’t feel like it, the coverage in the early ’60s was far less sensational than today. What I had seen on the pitch at Luton would certainly get reported, but not necessarily inflated disproportionately as a story, unless what Gregg had done really was heinous.So the big question in my mind was, how will this look in the papers? Worse, would he be prosecuted for assault ? Were there mitigating circumstances, such as self-defence?
In fact the press coverage was relatively restrained, the story only gaining prominence on the Monday, by which time the reporters had dug out the bones of what had happened. The man Gregg had punched was a local Luton factory-worker, although he originated in the north and claimed to be a United fan merely wishing to congratulate Harry on a fine performance.He said Gregg had been ‘a bit jittery’ because of the ‘rude comments’ Luton fans had been making behind his goal. He was as surprised as anyone when Gregg decked him , leaving him dazed and with a badly bruised face. When the ‘misunderstanding’ had been cleared up the two men supposedly shook hands and exchanged apologies.Harry also apologised to the Luton Chairman, who told him ‘not to worry’.
However, this account doesn’t quite tally with Harry’s version. He said he’d been trying to get over to shake the hand of his good friend Billy Bingham and this man kept blocking his path, despite attempts to move him out of the way. He ‘jostled’ Harry, who tried again to push through.Harry thought the man, who looked ‘quite tough’ ,was about to ‘clip’ him, so he got his retaliation in first, and whacked him one. He told the man if he wanted to take action he was welcome to, as he had no right to be on the pitch in the first place. In the event no action was taken and no charges laid against Harry. That said, it later emerged in Harry’s second autobiography, ‘Harry’s Game’ (2002) that Bedfordshire Police did issue a summons but after Matt Busby and the club backed him ‘100%’ the problem went away. A key argument was that the police themselves had failed to do their job in not protecting Harry from the pitch invader. (As a footnoote to that aspect of the tale, I managed to extract a formal apology from the Chief Constable of Bedfordshire Police in the mid-70s when I was assualted without any justification by a nasty little shit of a policemen during a ‘nothing’ end of season 2nd Division match between Luton and Bolton at Kenilworth Road. I got a full independent investigation conducted by The Met who completely confirmed my version of events and the cop had to face disciplinary proceedings. I’d been roughed up by police before at football matches, equally without any reason, and I’d had enough.)
The Harry Gregg punch story made headlines for a few days, including the fact that he had threatened a press photographer who tried to take his picture on his return from Luton with the team to Manchester, saying he would smash his camera and push him under a train if he didn’t stop. What made it worse was that the photographer was a fellow Munich survivor, Peter Howard. It looked as though Harry’s nerves were fraying. Maybe all that pent up guilt and anger inside him was becoming a problem. Yet, amazingly,after the short-lived controversy, it all just faded away, with no further consequences for Harry or United. How very different from Selhurst Park in 1995.
Indeed , as it happens, I saw Harry in action a few days after the Luton confrontation, in United’s next match, against West Ham at Upton Park on Good Friday, 15th April. United lost a terrific game 2-1, despite playing well, Alex Dawson scoring with an unstoppable 30 yard thunderbolt. Gregg looked perfectly cheerful , played excellently and was generally back to his athletic best,showing no ill-effects from his angry outburst at Luton. I recall one spectacular moment when he tipped over a booming volley and followed it over by swinging theatrically from the bar, which bent and twanged as he jumped down. The crowd is very close to the pitch at Upton Park and I was right behind the goal, close enough to see that Harry was far from ‘jittery’ despite whatever abuse was thrown at him. I don’t recall any Hammers fans taunting him specifically over Luton or his short temper, so the whole story had already died , in public at least.
What I didn’t know until a couple of years later was that Matt Busby had given Harry ‘the biggest verbal roasting’ of his life when he went to see ‘the boss’ on the Monday to explain what had happened at Luton, the manager having been absent from the game. This was revealed in Harry’s first autobiography, ‘Wild About Football’, published in 1961, which I got for Christmas from my parents (I treasure my copy to this day) .It was interesting however to discover that Busby saw the incident in many ways in the same way that I had. He was mainly concerned with the reputation of the club,and what Harry had done was not the sort of thing a Manchester United player should get involved in.Matt spoke in his usual quiet but authoritative way, saying that what Harry had done ‘reflected badly on the club’. Harry could not disagree, and accepted the telling-off.
Gregg remained with United for the next six years but was increasingly plagued by injuries, missing the ‘63 FA Cup Final and failing to make enough appearances to qualify for a Championship medal in 1964/5. His last great moment with United was probably when he played in the amazing 5-1 European Cup defeat of the mighty Benfica in Lisbon in 1966, when George Best truly announced himself on the world stage. He was sold to Stoke City a few months later, but only managed two appearances before retiring to become manager at Shrewsbury Town, the first of various managerial appintments.
Everyone of course remembers Gregg for his heroics at Munich and many will have seen him talking about the tragedy during the 50th anniversary commemorations last year. There is no doubt that the Crash had a massive impact on Harry in every way, and is seen by many as defining the player. So it’s quite touching to find out that for the man himself it was the sudden death of his young wife Mavis from cancer in 1962 which has been the most unbearable event in his life, leaving him to raise their much-loved children alone. It would have been around that time that I, not knowing about his wife’s illness, sent a photo to Harry, asking him to autograph it for me. For months nothing came, much to my disappointment, until well over a year later the photo arrived, duly signed, neatly placed in the stamped / addressed envelope I had provided. Needless to say that made my day, and the picture joined the others on my wall.
Because Harry and United meant so much to me, I always hoped that he would have a happy and fulfilled life after leaving the club, and had images of him surrounded by his old pals from Old Trafford, sharing memories, painful and amusing. So it was with some sadness that I read his second autobiography, ‘Harry’s Game’. From his book it’s clear how angry and bitter he is about what happened after Munich to him and the other survivors. He is particularly scathing about the sometimes callous and mean treatment received by those forced to retire because of their terrible injuries, Johnny Berry and his childhood friend Jackie Blanchflower. Other players got moved on, out of sight, out of mind, including the likeable Albert ‘Scanny’ Scanlon. One of the more attractive features of the book is this loyalty to old colleagues and friends, including kids who never made it but still merit a mention. In a way that makes it even sadder when he takes swipes at other people at the club, including Billy Foulkes, in his case over what actually happened at Munich. Then there are the even more shocking claims that some un-named ’senior’ United players were involved in match-fixing in the early-60s and again after he’d left the club in ‘66. I can think of few things more dispiriting to hear. It’s the ultimate betrayal to learn that some players were not playing their hearts out for the team. It makes you wonder about everyone at Old Trafford at the time.
Throughout the book there are angry clashes with people, misunderstandings, sometimes resolved, sometimes not, and Harry comes over as touchy, short tempered and thin-skinned at times, none of which is at all surprising given what happened to him. Apart from his heart-warming loyalty to friends, the other thing that stands out is Harry’s enduring passion for United. It’s a matter of immense pride that he played for the team, gaining the respect of some of the best players in the world. It mattered a lot to me that he played for United, and I’m glad it mattered to him.
I saw Harry Gregg play many times, and he could be erratic, but at his injury-free best he was up there with finest goalkeepers I’ve seen over the last half century at United, and he was always the most athletic and aesthetically pleasing of them all. Those old photos do not lie, he was forever pulling off ‘impossible’ saves with outstretched finger tips, back arched, legs jack-knifed behind him in perfect physical harmony. That’s how I would like to remember him, still a genuine hero, still a great goalkeeper, still a United Legend.
Thinking back to my starting point in all this, the two moments of violence in 1960 and 1995, I think Busby was right, and did the correct thing in giving Harry his quiet ‘roasting’, as the player himself accepted without rancour at the time. But one of the many things about the Luton incident that makes it so interesting is the light it sheds on the Cantona kick 35 years later, and vice versa. In his 2002 book Harry refers to the Selhurst Park incident, which he saw on TV and he says, referring back to his own Luton confrontation somewhat un-apologetically, ‘I suppose I can relate to this incident more than most’. This is how Harry writes about it having seen the fans verbally abusing Eric as he walked along the touchline after he’d been sent off: ‘Then this guy runs about 20 yards to hurl insults and Eric snaps. I kept thinking to myself, what was different about this guy, they were all shouting things at him? Just what was it that this lad said to provoke such a reaction? I thought to myself, bloody hell it must have been bad. And as is my way, I mouthed at the screen: ‘Go on, Eric, hit him again.’
My reaction to Eric’s kung-fu kick was not quite the same as Harry Gregg’s, but that’s a tale for next time.
That last line just cracked me up