Before the horrors of the Munich Air Disaster, Matt Busby’s boys were gearing up for an historic campaign across all three major competitions in 1957/58…
“We must have a chance for all three,”
said Matt Busby in the summer of 1957, when asked about his side’s chances of a clean sweep of major honours in the coming season.
Retaining the First Division title for a third successive term, going one further than the previous term’s FA Cup final defeat and building on a semi-final exit from the European Cup felt well within the capabilities of Busby’s thrilling young team, who were on the brink of greatness going into what would prove to be the most ill-fated campaign in club history.
United’s defence of the title certainly had an air of inevitability about it, having strolled to the previous season’s crown by an eight-point margin in the days of just two points for a victory. While Busby publicly set the bar high in all competitions, he privately placed added focus on that third straight title, and emulating Herbert Chapman’s Huddersfield Town (1920s) and Arsenal (1930s).
After a successful summer sojourn to Germany to prepare for this momentous challenge, United won five of the opening six — scoring 22 goals — to establish a two-point lead at the table’s top. But there were already doubters and challengers.
“Each and every game the champs played was like a cup tie,” the journalist Frank Taylor, who survived the Munich crash, would later write.
“Each and every team were determined to knock these cocky youngsters off their perch.”
Some summer controversy with the BBC had only exaggerated this feeling. Asked to feature in a training film, United’s squad requested a fee and then turned an offer down, deeming it too small. Gone was the ‘Busby Babes’ tagline, replaced by ‘money-grabbers’ and ‘big heads’.
Busby backed his players and railed against the alternative monikers.
“The lads should have got the rate for the job the same as any public entertainer,”
he explained.
United’s players had a long history of standing up for footballers’ rights, stretching back to the 1907 founding of the Players’ Union, but however sound their arguments a half-century later, it had not only opened the floodgates of criticism, but heightened the desire of opposition players and fans to defeat the “cocky youngsters” of MUFC.
Bolton Wanderers were the first to do so, and it was little surprise. Our Lancashire rivals had been Busby’s bogey team ever since his 1945 arrival. Four days later, a 2-1 defeat to Blackpool at home drew a headline that, with the benefit of historical hindsight, reads like a sick joke:
MANCHESTER UNITED CRASH AGAIN.
The next few months would render such hyperbolic vocabulary inappropriate thereafter.
“The championship, which everyone thought would be a walkover for Manchester United, is wide open again,” they continued.
Busby’s project, smooth sailing for several years, had finally been rocked, and it would take him three months to stabilise it. Having won the opening three games in a row, the Reds wouldn’t win three straight league games for the rest of the campaign.
Two defeats were of particular concern to United fans. At September’s end, title rivals Wolves doled out a third loss of the season. While United were missing key players due to flu, it hinted at a shifting of power in English football.
“IS BUSBY BOOM ENDING?”
one newspaper asked, and another mused: “Is this the end of Manchester United’s League supremacy?“
A pair of wins followed and a convincing triumph over Villa in the Charity Shield, but it was no good beating last year’s Cup winners; United were losing to the rising powers of the new season. A month on from the Wolves defeat, West Bromwich Albion’s direct style triumphed over the ‘scientific methods’ of Busby’s United in a classic match “beyond all praise.”
United remained entertainers, and there were some strong voices of support in the press. England great Tom Finney was one. “You cannot rule Manchester United out,” he said in one newspaper column. “To say that the great slide is on at Old Trafford is absolute rubbish.”
Another England international insisted “United are still a very great team. They are playing well but the ball just isn’t running for them at the moment… but it will before the season is over.”
In the European Cup, Busby’s side had eased past Shamrock Rovers thanks to a 6-0 win in Ireland, even if the home leg had been a less convincing 3-2 win.
Dukla Prague represented a well-drilled unit in the next round. They were, after all, the Czechoslovak army team. United’s thrilling attacking play was sufficient for a 3-0 home victory which would have been significantly larger were it not for the expert goalkeeping of the visitors. And Busby wanted more, because travelling behind the Iron Curtain into Eastern European was a tough test. It was a chill and dank Prague December that created a tricky pitch on which Eddie Colman was “sure-footed as a mountain goat,”
according to Frank Taylor, helping United to an aggregate victory.
Progress secured, United endured a miserable journey home as fog forced a significant delay and re-route via Amsterdam. The Reds suffered as a result, drawing 3-3 with Birmingham City at Old Trafford, leading club secretary Walter Crickmer and Busby to charter a plane to take them for our next European trip, to Belgrade, via Munich.
In the days of two points for a win, a draw after a European trip was not so bad — just one point dropped. But then it was another slip-up as a late goal condemned United to a first home defeat to Chelsea for 38 years. The Londoners were another direct team whose success against United presented a fundamental challenge to Busby’s long-term project and entire footballing philosophy. He needed to do something to demonstrate that the football his United team played was not just attractive, but effective, too.
Busby himself was defiant, insisting United “shall be there at the end of the season for the League championship and the Cup.
“The team are playing great football, but it is not coming off. It happens to everyone, but we shall get over it. We shall be there because I know my boys have the quality.”
That they had, but Busby’s public words and private thoughts were, like all good football managers, different things. He wanted more quality and found it in two sources: the transfer market, and the youth set-up.
This was always the way with Busby — a blend of rare, smart, big-money purchases with regular introductions of fresh blood from the Academy.
Albert Scanlon and Kenny Morgans were the young lads, alongside the slightly more experienced Bobby Charlton, while Matt made Harry Gregg the world’s most expensive goalkeeper as he joined from Doncaster Rovers. The Northern Irishman’s style was fresh in its contrast to Ray Wood, who he was replacing.
While Gregg stayed with captain Roger Byrne in his first few days in Manchester, he explained it to his new teammate: “The penalty box is my domain and if the ball comes into it, I’ll go for it.”
Byrne encouraged him in this attitude. “You come and knock us out of the way if you have to! We must have no more messing about in the penalty area.”
Harry made sure of that. In what the Irish press in attendance called a “story-book debut,” Gregg helped United to a first clean sheet in seven league games and “impressed in his coolness, daring and anticipation.”
It was those three attributes that would turn him into one of our club’s all-time heroes with his actions at Munich Airport just 47 days later.
Gregg’s loud dominance of the backline and the youthful exuberance of Scanlon, Morgans and Charlton in the front line provided the spark of inspiration for the stuttering champions on their Treble pursuit.
Busby set his sights on catching Wolves, but the task at hand was unprecedented in its difficulty. Stan Cullis’s side had the most commanding points advantage at Christmas since United’s wonderful 1908 team a half-century before.
Just like in 1999, though, United began to purr as the new year arrived. A Dennis Viollet hat-trick helped the Reds avoid a humiliating defeat to FA Cup minnows Workington Town and he scored another in a draw at Leeds. Red Star Belgrade visited Old Trafford next, with Charlton and Coleman the goalscorers in a 2-1 win played in a heavy mist. Only the ‘Black Cat of Yugoslavia’ — goalkeeper Vladimir Beara — kept the score down as United’s confidence surged.
Bolton Wanderers were the unfortunate victims of United’s unfulfilled striking prowess. Charlton’s hat-trick and Viollet’s double propelled Busby’s team to a 7-2 home win, soothing revenge after three consecutive defeats to the Trotters. The average age of United’s team had dropped to just 23 and Busby’s typically courageous move had helped cut the Wolves advantage down to five points. United were on the charge.
Ipswich were seen off in the FA Cup, with another two from the thriving 20-year-old Charlton. He was beginning to lead a United team reminding the country of just how exceptional they were. And down to north London they travelled, for one particular match which would complete that task, just in time. It proved a fixture that would, in the wonderful words of Geoffrey Green, “stand as an epitaph for a side the gods loved too much.”
Aiming to equal Arsenal’s three-in-a-row achievement of the ‘30s, it was fitting that Busby’s United showed their quality at Highbury as the march towards that record-equalling crown began. His side were unchanged for a sixth successive game. The momentum was building. And young Albert Scanlon was the star, nimbly dancing through the mud as United surged into a 3-0 lead.
Arsenal restored parity in a blistering three-minute spell before United re-established a two-goal advantage. When everyone could finally take a breath at full-time after the most staggering of football exhibitions, United had won 5-4. A game against title rivals Wolves approached, to be played as soon as United returned from Belgrade.
“Let’s get this Red Star side out of the European Cup first, and then we’ll deal with Wolves,”
Black Country boy Duncan Edwards said. “All I’ll say is, that if the boys play like they did against Arsenal, Stan Cullis’s boys will need to go some to beat us.”
The game never happened. The Busby Babes played only one more game, another remarkably entertaining 3-3 draw out in Yugoslavia. Celebrating another semi-final berth, United’s players dined and drank with those of Red Star. They returned to the hotel to meet Busby’s curfew, but many snuck back out to continue on. It was 3am when Roger Byrne and Mark Jones finally got back in. They would be tragically killed along with five team-mates just a dozen hours later and thus the Babes’ pursuit of the extraordinary remains an enduring hypothetical.
We will never know just how great that mesmerising collection of talent would have become.
This feature originally appeared in United Review.