In a team of bouncing Busby Babes, this young side who were declared the greatest in the world, one player stood out from the others. Confident, impossibly gifted and mythically revered...
Happy birthday Duncan Edwards born this day 1936.
“The tremendous power of his tackle... the immense power on the ball... he was a player’s player... the greatest”
Jimmy Murphy is the one of the most important men in @ManUtd history.
“Telling them what Jimmy did… it’s the most important thing you can tell a young player who is representing Manchester United," Sir Alex Ferguson told me for my 2018 biography of Jimmy.
Learn the Jimmy Murphy story here 🧵
Jimmy was a half-back (central/defensive midfielder) of international class. He played 200+ times for West Brom, inc. an FA Cup Final. Nickname ‘Tapper’, he finished his career with four games at Swindon in 1939 where he was reported to have tried scoring from the halfway line.
Jimmy served in WW2. As the war concluded he coached an army team using techniques he’d learned from Jimmy Hogan.
Giving a team talk as though the army game was a World Cup Final, a watching Matt Busby was impressed and promised him a job in Manchester as his assistant.
On this day 18 years ago we lost George Best, the greatest footballer of all time.
Why do I describe him as that?
Read on.
When George arrived in Manchester he was shy in character but fearless with the ball. His showmanship against Harry Gregg in training and exploits in youth games - running and scoring from kick off after telling John Fitzpatrick he would - gave birth to a legend before a debut.
He made his debut in 1963 and became a permanent first team player by January 1964.
His dribbling skills and imagination terrorized opposition teams. Pat Crerand reckoned that by the end of the year, Best was already the best player in the country.
Bobby Charlton was born on October 11, 1937, in Ashington, Northumberland.
So started the greatest story in football history.
In 1953, legendary @ManUtd scout Joe Armstrong was in the north east looking for talent. It was a foggy day - but the ability of one young lad called Robert Charlton stood out. Armstrong convinced the Charlton family that Manchester should be his home.
Bobby quickly became close with the emerging team which would become known as ‘the Busby Babes’. He fitted in seamlessly. A skillful, graceful inside-forward, Charlton won three Youth Cups.
It's very likely Manchester City will win it on Saturday.
It's the same achievement but it will be nowhere near as impressive, for two important reasons, which I'll explain in this thread.
* Disclaimer from the top, this is my opinion, I'm explaining it at length here. Many people will disagree (probably with both reasons), that's fine, I'm not entering into conversation about it, I won't change my opinion and I don't seek to change yours.
English football reached an arguable peak in the late 90s and early 00s (or from 96-2010) : a combination of post-Bosman foreign influx seeing top talent come to UK, the growing wealth in the PL and slight expansion of Champions League from 1 to 3 places.
So the dust is settling on the season… a bit of an anti-climax in the cup final.
Plenty of think-pieces already being written along the lines of “how can United match this City team?”… well, they don’t necessarily have to.
Mini-thread
There’s no point trying to imitate what’s happening at City. It can’t be done, not a club in the league has the financial clout to build, ride roughshod over bigger & similar size clubs to climb above them and stay there.
Not even Newcastle can do that now because teams are not as financially vulnerable as they were ten years ago to allow a rival to poach their best players to fatten up a squad. They’ll have to do it a longer/slightly different way, but it will be their blueprint to follow.
You know him. He became arguably the most important player in @ManUtd history and unquestionably the most influential player in Premier League history.
A thread on how, and why, that's the case.
After winning the ECWC in Rotterdam, United's squad felt they were the best in the country. Yet the following season they stumbled at the finish line when on course to win the last D1 as injuries and an absurdly packed fixture list cost them dearly. Confidence was on the floor.
That was the story of the start of the first Premier League campaign. Goals were hard to come by. Efforts to sign Shearer and Hirst were unsuccessful. A chance phone call from Leeds enquiring about Irwin led to a rebuttal and a reverse query - would you let Cantona go?