Paddy Crerand: Never Turn the Other Cheek

It took a while for me to find my feet at Old Trafford, to adjust to life in a new city and at a new football club where I wasn’t used to the players. I had no real friends and even though my team-mates made me feel welcome, they had issues of their own to deal with. There was discontent with the training, despite the two sessions laid down in the pass book, and matters became quite tense, with some players thinking that training could be more challenging. A meeting was sought with Matt Busby and club captain Noel Cantwell but I was new to the club and stayed on the sidelines – the last time I spoke my mind a few months earlier Celtic had transferred me. Players were looking to apportion blame to anyone but themselves, but I just wanted to get back on the pitch so that we could lift the mood.

To make matters worse, there was a thief in the changing room, with valuables frequently going missing. Matt gathered everyone together in the room, about thirty players including the reserves. He said, ‘We have a nigger in the woodpile.’ Dennis Walker, United’s first black player, was sitting there. I was so embarrassed for Dennis and so were the other lads. Matt wasn’t a racist – it was an expression which was used by his generation – but we thought Matt had put his foot in it. Dennis was a talented footballer who would have made it if he wasn’t so shy. As it happened, he only played one game, filling in for a resting Bobby Charlton before the 1963 FA Cup Final. The thief was eventually found, a reserve player who was bombed out of the club straightaway.

To add to the poor spirit, there were stories of match rigging when I arrived at Old Trafford. Harry Gregg, who I befriended, told me that he took part in a United game which was bent. Harry was straight, but he claimed several matches involving United were thrown during that season. I was new to Old Trafford, but I had seen evidence in Scotland of match fixing, seen that players had received money to lose games, even at the biggest clubs. Me? I have never received money to throw a game.

My first game in a Manchester United shirt was a friendly in Cork against Bolton Wanderers on 13 February 1963. The weather wasn’t as harsh in Ireland as it was in Britain, hence the location. We beat Bolton 4–2 and I scored a hilarious goal. I took a shot which deflected off a stone and past the goalkeeper. There was a big crowd, despite the terrible rain and the afternoon kick-off because there were no floodlights. Roy Keane’s father Mossy was at the game as a supporter – he took the afternoon off and got the sack for his troubles. Some have said that he’s never worked since!

I didn’t stay in the team hotel, but at Noel Cantwell’s house. Noel was from Cork and we had a great night out at a shebeen called Kitty Barry’s. Together with Harry Gregg, Noel was fantastic in helping me settle. He used to stress the importance of what he called ‘moral courage’ – players not shirking responsibilities on the field. I’d like to think that I didn’t.

The three of us were mad about football and would go and watch other teams from the north west play if we did not have a game. Because I didn’t drive, one of them would drive to Liverpool and we’d stand on the Kop, despite being Manchester United players. The Scousers would have a word with us, but it was good humoured. United fans might be surprised, but I always had great respect for Liverpool Football Club and Bill Shankly. I still respect the older generation of Liverpool football fans. When I go to Anfield I speak to longstanding Liverpool fans who can’t put up with what the rivalry has become – with the hooliganism and the nastiness between the fans. Liverpool and Manchester are both working-class cities that have produced two of the greatest football clubs in the world. People should be proud of that, but they are not.

I became friends with Shankly when I moved to England, a friendship which endured for decades. When I played for Scotland at Wembley in 1965, he came to see me in the dressing room. I was wearing number four, his old number, for Scotland and he touched my shirt and held it up with a real reverence – as though it was the most sacred number that a player could wear for Scotland. He didn’t say anything but he was almost crying.

In 1981, the United players put on a testimonial dinner for Sir Matt Busby at the Piccadilly Hotel in Manchester. It was to raise money for Matt because he wasn’t flush with cash, although he never liked to say anything. I asked Matt if he wanted anyone to come from Liverpool and he said Bill Shankly. I called Bill to invite him and his wife Nessie. He said he thought it was great that we were doing it for Matt and that nobody had ever done anything like that for him at Liverpool. Bill felt he had been treated badly by Liverpool in his final years. He used the Anfield gym on a daily basis and said to me that he wanted to be the fittest man in the graveyard, but he cut a lonely figure. He asked me the date of the dinner.

‘Monday 30 November,’ I told him.

‘Pat,’ he said, ‘do you know what date the 30 November is? Have you been in England so long that you have forgotten the feast day of the Patron Saint of Scotland, St Andrew?’

I had. Bill Shankly never made it to the function. He died that September.

Jock Stein, who was at Dunfermline, would travel down to watch United and Liverpool and if I knew he was coming I would ask him to bring some Glasgow rolls, a type of bread roll – in Manchester they have a version called barmcakes – which tasted much nicer than anything in England. You couldn’t – and still can’t – get the real thing in Manchester. Jock’s son-in-law was a baker and Jock used to fill his car with them and Irn Bru, because the Irn Bru in England tasted totally different from what I was used to in Scotland. There were certain sweets that you couldn’t get in Manchester so Denis Law and I would fight over them and the Glasgow rolls. I wouldn’t mind, but Denis wasn’t even from Glasgow. Despite the cultural differences, as I settled in I found Mancunians to be very much like Glaswegians. They were warm and would come and talk to you, it was that working-class thing.

I hadn’t been at Old Trafford long when one evening I went along to see a United youth team match. I had heard that our youth team were pretty impressive and I wanted to see for myself. I sat on the trainer’s bench with the coach Jack Crompton, but you didn’t need to be that close to see who the star of this game was – United’s right-winger, a skinny boy with thick black hair. His ball control was a dream. He gave you the impression he could beat his man any way he wanted, although he was inclined to take on too many at a time. I couldn’t have been more impressed.

‘See that winger,’ I said to Jack at half-time, ‘you have a great prospect there.’

Jack didn’t even turn round. He just nodded his head and said, ‘I know.’ I thought Jack was being a bit arrogant and that he could have shown a bit more enthusiasm.

‘The way he carries the ball, his positioning, his touch, his speed,’ I went on, ‘he’s easily the best player I’ve seen at this level.’ Jack let me talk on for a while then, in a father to son manner, he put me fully in the picture.

‘Paddy,’ he said, ‘you’ve made no great discovery. Everybody at Old Trafford knows about this boy. He’s a wonderful prospect.’

Even though United were going through a difficult period, the lad was about sixteen, so they had to wait until he grew older and developed, and hope that nothing would happen to take the shine off what they thought was a football gem. His name, as if you haven’t guessed it, was George Best.

The first place Noreen and I lived in when we moved to Manchester was some digs with a Mrs Scott on Marsland Road, Sale. The rent was £6 a week. Even though I was United’s second most expensive signing, there was no star treatment. In fact, the traffic was so noisy outside that it drove me mental. Mrs Scott was a United nut and a lovely person. She wasn’t a Catholic, but she used to go to the local church and pray for United every Saturday morning. It was hard living in digs because we’d never lived away from home before, nor under the same roof, albeit in different beds. Noreen used to return to Glasgow once a month, but I couldn’t because I had to play.

Bobby and Norma Charlton invited us out to dinner on one of our first weekends in Manchester. I’d always respected and admired him as a player. He was quite shy, so I appreciated him inviting us to a pub in Flixton near where he lived. Bobby asked me what I wanted to drink and I asked for a sherry. I wasn’t into alcohol and I didn’t even drink sherry, but I thought it would be a sensible choice. He did a double take, thinking that I was such a big Glaswegian drinker that I drank neat sherry instead of beer. We had a smashing night, but I hardly drank anything. The goalkeeper Harry Gregg collared me on Monday morning and asked me how Saturday night had gone.

‘Fine.’ I said. ‘Why?’

‘Because Bobby was shitting himself that you would go potty if the waiter spilt something or someone said something to you.’

‘Am I that bad?’ I asked Harry. I couldn’t believe that I had a reputation for being a snapper after just a few weeks living in Manchester. Actually, the reputation stuck. Denis Law once said, ‘If Pat starts, the best thing to do is put out the lights and lie on the floor.’ Denis also used to tell me that I had two speeds – slow and dead stop. I don’t think that I am bad tempered, but if someone did something to me I could be.

When the weather finally began to thaw and United started playing, I wasn’t an immediate success. My first competitive game was against Blackpool who had my nemesis Pat Quinn, previously of Motherwell, playing for them. The game was at Old Trafford on 23 February. The crowd was 43,121. Old Trafford was big, but three sides of the ground were predominantly terracing and it was no grander than Ibrox or Celtic Park. In the following months I would play at smarter stadiums like Goodison Park and Highbury. It wasn’t until the sweeping cantilever stand went up at Old Trafford for the 1966 World Cup that the stadium began to be considered one of the best in Britain.

New players take time to adjust to their surroundings and I was no different. I over-hit passes and because I didn’t know how people played I had to get used to my team-mates. I wasn’t the player I knew I could be, but I always felt that Matt respected me, especially as he sought my opinions about other players he was considering signing.

Sir Alex Ferguson does it now, as in the case of Cristiano Ronaldo. He saw for himself how good Ronaldo was when Sporting Lisbon played United in a pre-season friendly in 2003, but when his players came into the dressing room raving about him that made him more certain that he should sign him. He did the same with Eric Cantona in 1992 after Steve Bruce and Gary Pallister told him that the Frenchman was easily the best player they had come up against.

Matt asked Denis about me and he asked him about Jim Baxter, too. He wanted to know about players’ backgrounds and what type of person they were. I was told that Denis said that while Jimmy was probably the better player, his lifestyle could lead to problems. Denis said that I had what it took to be a Manchester United player because I looked after myself and wasn’t a big drinker or gambler. Matt had an idea of what constituted a Manchester United player and was assessing whether players he liked would be good professionals or trouble makers. His judgement was based on far more than an individual having talent.

It was sensible of Matt to seek opinions from his players because players know which opponents are difficult to play against. I felt honoured that Matt respected my views so soon after joining. He asked me about the Dundee defender Ian Ure. It seems incredible now, but Dundee had a great team and were playing in the semi-final of the European Cup against Milan. I said that Ian was a good player, but that he struggled in the air a little bit. Dundee lost in Milan and three of their goals were from headers. Having seen that game, Matt came to me the next day and thanked me for my thoughts. Ian later came to United, but it wasn’t Matt who signed him.

One thing I found refreshing in England was the lack of sectarian abuse during games. Surprisingly, Rangers players were one of the few of our rivals in Scotland who had never given us abuse, but at other grounds it was commonplace. In many grounds we played, opponents and fans would call us Fenian bastards for 90 minutes. I liked the absence of that in England.

The perception was that United were big spenders after my transfer fee and the record £115,000 spent on Denis Law a year earlier. But the club wasn’t flush. When Matt had gone for Denis the chairman Harold Hardman was reluctant to spend that much money. He had been at the club long enough to know United were unable to pay high wages and extravagance didn’t appeal to him. The Manchester bookmaker Johnny Foy, who was a great friend of Matt’s, offered to underwrite the bid for Denis. United never made this public, but in the end I think United gave the impression that they had paid the money themselves, when they had in fact accepted the underwriting from Foy.

Things started to go right for me by the time we played Southampton in the semi-final of the FA Cup at Villa Park on 27 April. It was not a good game on a terrible pitch. Denis Law scored the only goal in front of 65,000 but we went back to the Cromford Club, which was owned by Matt’s friend Paddy McGrath, to celebrate after the game. Gigi Peronace was in there. He was a football agent in the days before football agents. He was great friends with Denis, having been responsible for his move to Torino. I must have been doing something right because he asked me if I was interested in joining Roma. Jean Busby, Matt’s wife, overheard and said, ‘He’s going nowhere.’ Coming to England was a big enough jump for me.

Matt paid for champagne for the whole team that night. A lot of Manchester people saw us in the Cromford Club, and as the word got passed from mouth to mouth the stories got more colourful. Manchester was like a village when it came to gossip. Apparently we were all plastered and Matt was worse than anyone. Nonsense. We all had a few, but we’d just reached the FA Cup Final so why couldn’t we celebrate?

People said that Matt was so close to his top players that he could not bring himself to discipline them. Rubbish. Did people really imagine that United could be successful if there was no discipline? Every great manager has to be a disciplinarian. Matt was like a father figure, but fathers are sometimes required to kick you up the backside and he could sort you out, believe me. Whoever said ‘iron fist in a velvet glove’ about him was right. He could be a hard taskmaster. There were plenty of blow outs, but people didn’t read about them because what happened inside Old Trafford stayed inside Old Trafford. Matt believed that punishment was a private affair and he rarely criticized his players publicly, just like Sir Alex Ferguson now.

If you were suspended for ill-discipline then you didn’t get paid. That meant you had to answer to your wife because you weren’t bringing a wage home. Matt never swore, but if he raised his voice you were almost disappointed in yourself because you had let him down. Matt could back up his words with a formidable physical presence. He was a former miner and soldier and had it come to a fight, he would have probably got the better of all his players, not that he ever fought with them.

Matt gave Manchester United dignity. Matt Busby and Alex Ferguson are great losers. It kills them to lose, but they maintain their respect for other people. Other managers will show contempt or disregard. Matt had that respect for others and graciousness in defeat in abundance.

Matt probably brought the comments upon himself because he readily socialized with players and he said in many interviews that he allowed his players to ‘play it off the cuff’. People took that to mean that we went out to play on a Saturday without any real plan, but that wasn’t true. When Matt talked about playing it off the cuff he meant that he laid down no rigid set of rules for the forwards. You couldn’t tell players like Denis Law or Bobby Charlton what to do with the ball at their feet … instinct did that.

We played the first fifteen minutes of every game with a calculated defensive plan until we assessed the strength of the opposition. I won’t forget my first Manchester derby in May 1963 when we played our final four league games in just eleven days because of the backlog of fixtures caused by the inclement weather. Both United and City were in serious danger of going down and we drew 1–1 at Maine Road. We didn’t deserve a point. The City player David Wagstaff had a go at me just before half-time. I didn’t like players who had a go on the pitch and said, ‘If you’ve got something to say then do it off the pitch.’ Well, he did. He came up to me in the tunnel and shouted, ‘You, you c**t …’ I turned round and belted him and he went down like a ton of bricks. Then City’s trainer came for me and I said, ‘You f**k off too or you’ll get it.’ He took me seriously and retreated.

Matt came in the changing room and he was livid, absolutely furious. I’d never seen him like that before. He walked straight up to me and said, ‘Did you hit David Wagstaff?’ I said, ‘No.’ I was afraid of Matt; he was going off his head. The fight made the papers and I didn’t come out of it too well, but I got off lightly in comparison to my punishment if it had happened today. Matt knew it was me, but he never mentioned the incident again. I was young, daft and had acted in the heat of the moment. There was nothing personal against Wagstaff – he was a very talented player whom Matt considered signing for United. I got in a few scrapes in the future, but I never went down. You don’t go down when you are from the Gorbals.

We finally left Manchester for London on the Wednesday afternoon. We passed the twin towers of Wembley and the floodlights were on for a rather special occasion – Milan were playing Benfica in the European Cup Final.

Leicester City, our opponents, were favourites to win the cup. They had finished the season fourth behind champions Everton, Tottenham, and Burnley, whereas United only just avoided relegation by finishing in nineteenth place. It was a bleak time in Manchester – City were relegated, not that we were too concerned as we prepared to play Leicester.

The bookmakers were not confident about United, but we were and thought we’d play them at their own game, even though I’m not a gambler. Denis Law knew a bookie in Aberdeen and four players bet £100 each on United to win the Cup – a fortune and over twice my weekly wage. I wasn’t usually a gambler, but we stood to win £150 on top of our stake if we won.

Noel Cantwell, our captain, went to Wembley the day before the game to do a television piece with the Leicester captain for the BBC. They wanted Noel to walk up the Wembley steps to lift the cup, but he refused, saying that he didn’t want to tempt fate. The team was named on the day of the game and it surprised me. Nobby Stiles was left out – he never did play in an FA Cup Final. Harry Gregg was dropped for David Gaskell and Shay Brennan was omitted. They weren’t happy, but what could we say to them? It happens in football. I’d never seen an English Cup Final live in my life and I wanted to savour the moment. The first time I had heard of United was when I listened to the 1948 FA Cup Final on a radio in the Gorbals and here I was fifteen years later about to play in one for the Reds, with United again underdogs.

The Wembley dressing room was roasting, which was no surprise as the game was played on 25 May. Before the match I went for a walk in my kit. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. Having watched the English Cup Final so many times on television, I wanted to see the band on the pitch and that man in the daft white outfit who waved a stick around when they sang ‘Abide with Me’. I stood there marvelling and thinking, ‘This is magnificent.’ I wasn’t nervous, just curious.

Apparently Matt was frantic with worry and wondered where I had got to. He wasn’t happy when he saw me, but he didn’t have time to tell me off as the game was due to start. And he didn’t tell me off after the game because the 1963 Cup Final was my best individual game for Manchester United. The whole team played superbly and while Denis and I got the credit, Johnny Giles and Bobby Charlton were outstanding as we beat Leicester 3–1 with two goals from David Herd and one from Denis Law. I sent Denis in for a goal on the half hour and after that Leicester just couldn’t shut us down.

Gordon Banks, the Leicester and England goalkeeper, spilled a shot by Bobby Charlton and David Herd nipped in to make it two. Leicester’s Ken Keyworth headed a goal back for them, but then Banks made another error and Herd got his second. If we had won the game by six or seven people would have said it was a fair result. More importantly, it was United’s finest hour since the tragedy at Munich and the start of a great six years.

The Daily Telegraph, not a paper I’ve ever been in the habit of buying, paid me a glowing tribute. Referring to the European Cup Final between Milan and Benfica at Wembley, played a few days before we beat Leicester, it said: ‘Even Rivera and Eusebio, the bright young stars of European soccer, did nothing on Wednesday that Law did not equal on Saturday. No Italian or Portuguese half-back showed greater intelligence or craftsmanship than did Crerand. All the teamwork which won Milan the European championship was no sounder than that which earned United the Cup.’

The Queen was waiting to present the trophy. I’m many things, but a royalist is not one of them so I just kept my head down and picked up my medal.

We had a banquet at the Savoy Hotel afterwards. We were allowed to take two guests and I took my wife and my mother. None of us were used to going into flash hotels and I was a bit in awe, more so when I saw a man on our table beckon a waiter over. He handed him a five pound note, a lot of money, and said, ‘When I want a drink I shall point my finger and I expect you to be here.’ The waiter was round him like a fly round shit all night. The man was Paddy McGrath, a great friend of Sir Matt Busby and a big United fan. Paddy was a successful entrepreneur and bought the first executive box at Old Trafford, right on the halfway line.