About Me:
I was a young lad of 8 when the Munich tragedy happened. I was a wanderer since birth as my father was in the
RAF and I spent my first 8 years between England and Asia (Singapore and Hong Kong). Even though my father was a Rugby man I held out for soccer. You have to remember that, at this time, I could only keep in touch with
news in England through the World Service Radio broadcast. In those days there was no
satellite or cable, only the Cinema news with the cockerel sitting on a world atlas which
pronounced the news before the big film or the Radio. In those days you had 2 films - the first was called a B-film which preceded the main film. Those were the days!! Often the B-film was better than the main one but you would still be out within 3 hours. Nowadays you pay the same for one film and are bored after 1 hour!!
Up until Munich I had no particular favourite sport and was quite good at
athletics especially the Long Jump. I didn't then support any one team, not even
Bristol City/Rovers or Swindon apart from going to the odd match when I could
get someone to take me! However the sudden loss of some of the greatest footballers ever seen
in the Munich tragedy and the battling nature of Sir Matt Busby caught my attention
as I listened to the BBC in a foreign land. From then I have been a true red.
After returning to Compton Bassett (Wiltshire) in 1959 at the age of 11 I remember how I enjoyed
playing for my school team as a winger. I even enjoyed going to play another school on a frosty Saturday morning even though the ground was
frozen hard and when you fell it was bloody painful! Compared to the overpaid
Nancy boys
of today, the players of the fifties and sixties were low paid but tough as
nails and wouldn't think of falling over or crying at the soft tackles you get nowadays!
After 3 years I was then whisked back to my birthplace of Belleek in N. Ireland (aged 12.5) and entered a whole new universe. First of all no one knew what soccer was (except it was a foreign game) and secondly I had no friends to fall back on
apart from the few I already knew from my holidays there but they came
from a different background. I tried playing Gaelic but kept trying to play
soccer and eventually gave up altogether. Through all this I still had ManU but it was hard to get any pictures or to watch them except for the newsreels when they won trophies. Once I
reached 18 and got a job in the Civil Service (Belfast) I was able to buy posters and watch "our boy's" on TV
as well as trips to OT. The next great thing was the Video Player and suddenly, I could buy videos of the great matches. Also I was of an age to see the greatest player in the world in the flesh - George Best - at Windsor Park, especially when he almost beat England single-handed. He was the greatest player never to have played in the World Cup!!
I have been privileged to watch some of the greatest players don the United
jersey and enjoyed numerous visits to the Theatre of Dreams. What a fantastic
rollercoaster of a journey from the greats of the 60,s, through the depression
years of the 70,s and 80.s, and then the brilliance of 1993 to 2003. Having
supported this great club through 26 years of failure to win only a few FA Cups,
a year or two without a trophy pales into insignificance.