{"id":295123,"date":"2023-10-22T22:24:46","date_gmt":"2023-10-22T22:24:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/allmysportsnews.com\/?p=295123"},"modified":"2023-10-22T22:24:46","modified_gmt":"2023-10-22T22:24:46","slug":"ian-herbert-it-was-the-day-we-came-to-honour-our-hero-bobby-charlton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/allmysportsnews.com\/soccer\/ian-herbert-it-was-the-day-we-came-to-honour-our-hero-bobby-charlton\/","title":{"rendered":"IAN HERBERT: It was the day we came to honour our hero, Bobby Charlton"},"content":{"rendered":"
There had been no time to assemble elaborate floral tributes and many of those who made their way towards Old Trafford through the streets of redbrick back-to-backs clutched cheap \u00a35 bouquets which were propped, modest and lacking ostentation, at the foot of the United Trinity statue. Sir Bobby Charlton would have liked that.<\/p>\n
A few people laid shirts, one of which, bearing the name \u2018Charlton\u2019, was royal blue \u2014 the colour United wore on one of the nights that always stayed with Sir Bobby: the 1968 European Cup win at Wembley over Benfica which, for him, belonged to the cherished friends and team-mates he had lost on a Munich runway, 10 years earlier.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The messages on the tributes were simple. \u2018RIP\u2019 \u2014 scribbled on a page of foolscap, soaked by the last of the overnight rain.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018England\u2019s finest\u2019, inked on to a small red ribbon, laid on the ground.<\/p>\n
Those who had organised this act of collective remembrance were concerned to direct those participating towards the books of condolences which had been opened at the International Suite, at the other end of the ground.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Manchester United fans arrived in their numbers at Old Trafford to pay tribute to the late Sir Bobby Charlton<\/p>\n
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Flowers, shirts and more were laid following news of the former United star’s passing on Saturday<\/p>\n
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United were plunged into a state of shock as they said goodbye to one of their greatest ever players<\/p>\n
Your browser does not support iframes.<\/p>\n
Though it was not pre-planned, the two-minute walk to that second place of sanctuary \u2014 we shuffled down past the old Munich clock on the corrugated red metal of Old Trafford\u2019s south-east corner and into the Munich Tunnel \u2014 took mourners to the heart of the tragedy which defined Sir Bobby and never left him.<\/p>\n
Dozens of people lingered at one of the plaques on the Tunnel wall with pictures of those who survived and those who didn\u2019t. Alongside Sir Bobby\u2019s image is that of the Daily Mail<\/span> journalist Peter Howard, who also made it out of the wreckage. Above them are his team-mate Tommy Taylor and the Manchester Evening News\u2019 Tom Jackson, who did not.<\/p>\n Other murals depict the thrill of United being rebuilt by Sir Matt Busby. \u2018The new Kings of Europe\u2019 proclaims a Daily Mail back page which forms part of one. But the overwhelming sense of loss meant Sir Bobby could not quite see it that way.\u00a0<\/p>\n To study the images of him in the Munich Tunnel and in the special edition of the Manchester Evening News published on Sunday, under a banner headline, \u2018Hero to Millions\u2019, was to appreciate the weight of the burden he bore. He found it so very hard to rejoice.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u2018Mine, until the day I die, is the tragedy which robbed me of so many of my dearest friends who happened to be team-mates,\u2019 Charlton said of Munich, years later.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u2018Even now, 49 years on, it still reaches down and touches me every day. Sometimes I feel it quite lightly, a mere brush stroke across an otherwise happy mood. Sometimes it engulfs me with terrible regret and sadness \u2014 and guilt that I walked away and found so much. The crash is always there.\u2019<\/p>\n It was there, too, Sunday, in the hush of the International Suite where the first queues were starting to form at 11am. Inside the cavernous room, Pathe news reels about the disaster were playing with the sound off. Though there was footage, too, of that extraordinary May night in 1968 when Charlton and Best, in their royal blue jerseys, brought the European Cup home to Manchester.<\/p>\n Several of those waiting to sign the books reflected that one of the few threads to a better, kinder, more intimate football past had been lost with Sir Bobby Charlton\u2019s passing. This was the view of a man in his 60s, who was born on Stretford\u2019s Partridge Street, one of the terraces close to the ground.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u2018We\u2019d see the players kicking a ball in the street,\u2019 he said. \u2018They were a part of these streets. Gradually, that\u2019s gone.\u2019 One of the condolence messages seemed to affirm this view: \u2018End of an era.\u2019<\/p>\n Of course, that\u2019s not the only way the world has changed since the 15-year-old Charlton first arrived at this stadium in 1956, wearing a sea green ankle length mackintosh which his mother had insisted he would \u2018grow into.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n Old Trafford still had no floodlights back then and there was no roof over the Stretford End. But neither was there a need for security guards to scan fans with x-ray wands before they walked past the floral shrine, or for the body scanning machines we had to step through before entering the condolence book room. More evidence of a harsher world.<\/p>\n The security staff were apologetic and no one was dwelling on it. The conversation outside the International Suite was about the goals Sir Bobby scored, the extraordinary way he scored them and which had been his best.<\/p>\n One of a group of men in their 70s, Fred Delaney, remembered Sir Bobby\u2019s hat-trick at Blackburn\u2019s Ewood Park on the way to the 1965 First Division title. But the memory seared on the minds of several more was not a goal but a reaction \u2014 to a 3-3 draw in Real Madrid\u2019s Bernabeu which took United to the 1968 European Cup final. \u2018<\/p>\n Bobby wept,\u2019 said Jim Davidson, one of the group. \u2018He wept on the pitch. That told us what it meant to him. Unforgettable. Utterly unforgettable. That was the emotion he carried into winning the European Cup for the memory of the lads who died.\u2019<\/p>\n It was the player\u2019s class as an individual which marked him out, Delaney observed. \u2018He beat some of these teams on his own but you would not have known it, given his modesty. He had grace. He had class.\u2019<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Scarves were laid alongside various United shirts, some with Charlton’s name on the backs<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Supporters both young and old were present at Old Trafford at the end of a week that has been a rollercoaster for the club<\/p>\n It was ever thus. Decades later, when the old Manchester United certainties were beginning to unspool as the Glazer family bought the club, Sir Bobby unwittingly found himself besieged by a media scrum, after happening to amble across the concourse where the United Trinity statue stands.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Glazers had made their first visit to Old Trafford that day and had sought Sir Bobby out for 90 minutes of discussion before making a rapid exit and evading the media.<\/p>\n \u2018They thought I could answer some questions about football, as there were maybe things they didn\u2019t know,\u2019 Sir Bobby calmly explained. \u2018They don\u2019t know the football game.\u2019 How shrewd that assessment has proved to be.<\/p>\n Sir Bobby could not have anticipated that his beloved United would be wracked with the consequences of that takeover, 18 years on. His death was announced at the end of a week in which United\u2019s board discussed Sir Jim Ratcliffe\u2019s plans to rebuild the club while holding a mere 25 per cent share of it.<\/p>\n Protests about the Glazers\u2019 refusal to leave had been planned around Tuesday’s Champions League home match against FC Copenhagen, though few will want an emotional night of remembrance to be overshadowed by protest now. In later years, Sir Bobby\u2019s greater concerns were for the health of his old comrades-in-arms, particularly Nobby Stiles, with whom he was close.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sir Bobby remained a regular visitor to the Stiles family\u2019s modest semi-detached house on Kings Road in Stretford, when his old-team-mate was contending with the struggle with dementia which he too would come to face.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Bobby remained a loyal patron of United until his death and was regularly seen at Old Trafford<\/p>\n <\/p>\n His passing will be mourned by many for a long time with tributes to be paid at United’s next home game<\/p>\n It was distressing for Sir Bobby to see his friend\u2019s decline, at times, though he was a pillar of support for Stiles\u2019 wife, Kay, and their family.<\/p>\n \u2018My dad and Bobby were big friends,\u2019 Stiles\u2019 son, Rob, said on Sunday. \u2018Bobby was very good to dad when my uncle, Johnny Giles, left United in 1963. He took him under his wing. The families spent time together when we were kids and I have great memories of that. Above all, great memories of what a good man Bobby was.\u2019<\/p>\n Sir Bobby\u2019s own last years, contending with that same illness, had not been easy. Rob Stiles reflected a relief that the man he knew as a family friend \u2018is no longer suffering.\u2019 But in a long retirement and a long life he was able to savour the memory of the glorious occasions in a way which was perhaps harder when he still played the game.<\/p>\n I spoke with him at length only once, at the Mere Hotel near Knutsford, Cheshire, in May 2008, when we discussed the 1968 European Cup win over Eusebio and Co, 40 years on.<\/p>\n Sir Bobby recalled, in the most vivid detail, the heat and humidity of that London night. How he and his team-mates had killed the long hours waiting to play by watching Lester Piggott win the Derby on Sir Ivor. How he had missed the post-match celebrations in London because he had fainted with dehydration.\u00a0<\/p>\n But, above all, how \u2014 as he remembered it \u2014 the whole nation seemed to be willing United on that night because of the deeper significance, a decade on from Munich.<\/p>\n \u2018At Wembley you don\u2019t see the crowd because everything\u2019s dark under the stand,\u2019 Sir Bobby told me as we drank coffee on that bright spring morning. \u2018But I sensed for the first time that instead of people not wanting Manchester United to win unless they supported them, everybody was behind us. It was a national thing.\u2019<\/p>\n And it is \u2018a national thing\u2019 now. The acts of remembrance extend far beyond the flowers, the shirts and scarves at the foot of the statue which creates an immortality of sorts for Sir Bobby, George Best and Denis Law.\u00a0<\/p>\n Though a simple message scrawled on the royal blue shirt there perhaps put things best. \u2018Greatest player on the pitch. Greatest player off the pitch.\u2019 We will not know his like again.<\/p>\n It’s All Kicking Off\u00a0is an exciting new podcast from Mail Sport that promises a different take on Premier League football, launching with a preview show today and every week this season.<\/span><\/p>\n It is available on MailOnline, Mail+, YouTube , Apple Music and Spotify<\/span><\/p>\n Your browser does not support iframes.<\/p>\nIT’S ALL KICKING OFF!\u00a0<\/h3>\n