Sympati fra Madrid
Real Madrid, kommende ukes motstandere, tilbød sin hjelp etter ulykken, og spilte en vennskapskamp på Old Trafford den 1. august 1959 mot halvparten av ordinær betaling. Spillerne deres mottok like fullt £50 hver for seier, et enormt beløp i forhold til United-spillernes lønninger.Men for Real dreide det seg ikke bare om penger. Santiago Bernabeu, klubbens legendariske styreformann, tok spillerne sine med til Eddie Colmans gravsted i Salford for å legge ned en krans. Siden Roger Byrne var blitt kremert og noen av de øvrige ikke var fra Manchester, var Colmans grav den som lå nærmest Old Trafford.Deretter gikk Bernabeus europacupvinnere, bestående av spillere som Di Stefano, Santa Maria og Puskas, hen og banket United 6-1. De var så gode at de 63.500 på tribunen klappet dem inn til pause. – Det kan virke rart å tape 6-1 og likevel ha nytt hvert øyeblikk av kampen. Likevel tror jeg at jeg kan uttale meg på vegne av hele laget når jeg sier at vi koste oss med å få stryk av Real, sa David Herd senere.
Real ville imidlertid ikke ha gitt et fullt lag av Busby Babes juling på en slik måte.
Det vil heller ikke dagens moderne Real under Jose Mourinho gjøre til uken – selv om de er knappe forhåndsfavoritter.
Had you stood by the Munich clock at Old Trafford at 3.04pm on the 6th February in the 1990s, you’d have been almost alone. At times, there were fewer than a dozen people paying their respects, a small group which included Cliff Butler, long-time editor of the United Review.
Munich’s anniversary was never forgotten, but nor was it remembered as it is today, when hundreds gather outside the clock, the original version of which was paid for by supporters. Fans now sing The Flowers of Manchester, an anonymous folk song in the style of a soldiers’ lament, written in 1968, an act which is repeated before the nearest home game to the anniversary.
A minute’s silence has always been observed at games played on the anniversary, although not in 2003 as the nearest home game was against Manchester City and there were fears that it might be disrupted.
Social media has changed the memorials too. Sites were filled with references to Munich for the 55th anniversary this Wednesday, with iconic pictures of the Babes in Belgrade, of graves and a stricken airplane in the Munich snow. To some, it’s a symptom of an increasingly maudlin, mawkish Britain which revels in grief, be it the flowers which accompanied the near death of Fabrice Muamba, to the many silences at games to honour a passing friend or foe. To these cynics, it’s all a bit Scouse. It’s unedifying to see fans point scoring over a disaster and one wonders what the relatives of the deceased make of it.
The Munich Air disaster will be forgotten if it’s not remembered though. In September, I went to see the recently retired Bayern Munich goalkeeper Hans Jorg Butt at his home. He lives close to the crash site and explained: “The older people in Munich know the story, not so much the younger people.”
In Munich itself, the crash is almost forgotten. A simple memorial to the 23 people who died as sits at the Manchesterplatz, at end of a residential avenue near what was once the Munich-Reim airport. United officials visit on any trip to Munich, while City sent a large representation to pay their respects before the Blues played Bayern Munich in September 2011. City, as a club, have always been faultless in paying their respects and their fans were exemplary on the 50th anniversary in 2008 when almost no United fans thought they would be, though a minority of the most cerebrally challenged persist in singing Munich songs.
The manner of the memorials has changed over the decades, from the original ‘black week’ which followed the disaster. In the immediate aftermath, the Football League ordered a two minutes’ silence at all games on Saturday 8th February, together with the wearing of black armbands and the lowering of flags to half mast. However, the League’s ‘official silence’ was preceded at a Halle Orchestra concert in Sheffield on 7th February. The audience stood as the orchestra played Elgar’s ‘Nimrod Variation’, ‘the musicians’ traditional tribute for colleagues who have died’, followed by the observation of a minute’s silence.
The league came under criticism for not suspending matches and The Manchester Evening Chronicle claimed that the ‘vast majority’ of Manchester people wanted professional football called off the following Saturday. The league consulted United, whose chairman Harold Hardman backed their decision to carry on as ‘the best way of playing tribute to the players concerned in the tragedy’. After all, the League programme had not been suspended after the death of the last two kings.
On the night of 10th February, remarkable demonstrations of public mourning accompanied the return to Old Trafford of the bodies of the dead players and Manchester United officials which had been flown back to Manchester. Although the aeroplane arrived late at midnight, and it rained heavily, the twelve mile route from Ringway airport to the stadium was lined, according to the Daily Express, by a quarter of a million onlookers, although The Times reduced the figure to a still impressive 100,000. The bulk of the spectators stood to attention in orderly ranks or maintained a ‘silent vigil’ as the coffins passed. Others demonstrated their sorrow more openly: ‘women knelt and men wept’. One of those who joined the vigil directly evoked the war said ‘This is the most terrible thing that has happened since the Blitz and the least we can do is to pay our respects’. Women were prominent in the crowds of mourners, reflecting perhaps partly the pin-up status of the ‘Busby Babes’, but also symbolically mourning the loss of sons, brothers and husbands in wartime. Another German goalkeeper, Manchester City’s Bert Trautman was among those there that night.
“It was cold and wet, one of those awful Mancunian winter nights that I don’t miss now I live in Valencia,” he says. “I wanted to pay my respects and intended going alone, but my wife said she wanted to come. And friends. And friends of friends, people who had no interest in football. The disaster touched us all.”
Manchester was in shock, yet there were dissenting voices. When some businesses in the city refused to fly their flags at half-mast, one letter writer defended them for resisting the prevailing ‘mass hysteria’.
Some relatives of the dead players maintained their own commemorative ‘shrines’ in their homes, collections of shirts, caps and medals, as well as other mementoes, which they showed to visitors. The journalist John Roberts was still able to see these ‘shrines’ twenty-five years after the crash.
United were presented with two illuminated ‘rolls of honour’, a WW1 practice which endured after the Second. One, from prisoners in Pentonville carried the RAF motto, ‘Per ardua ad astra’, another, listing the names of the dead, came from an ex-servicemen’s club in Stretford. A third, ‘Coggan’s Memorial to the Ambassadors of Sport’, is still displayed, like many military rolls, in a Cheshire church: St. Luke’s Dukinfield.
The graves of some of the players became sites of unofficial pilgrimage. A Salford man claimed to have visited Eddie Colman’s grave every week ‘because he was our local star’.
The courage shown by Duncan Edwards in his two week struggle for life won him a special place among the dead. Edwards’s father, Gladstone, became caretaker at Dudley’s Queen’s Cross cemetery where his son and infant daughter were buried and guided visitors to the grave they shared. A 1967 tribute reported that, ‘Even now … there are sometimes 20 pilgrims a day at his grave in Dudley Cemetery’. Standing at the side of Colman’s headstone was a marble statuette of the player in his kit with a ball at his feet, but it was removed later because of damage by vandals and kept in his grandfather’s house along with other mementoes. This is not the only memorial of the disaster, intended to be permanent, which suffered later harm or neglect. Edwards’s headstone, unveiled by Matt Busby at a special ceremony on 5th October 1958, bore his portrait, a continental European tradition rarely seen on English graves.
There were several more memorials at Old Trafford, the first unveiled on 25th February 1960. The memorial was unpublicised as it was felt that thousands of spectators would try to attend. The Manchester Evening Chronicle observed that the unveiling would bring a measure of closure to the mourning. ‘Quietly…the closing chapters were written … to the tragedy at Munich.’
The memorials continued, with attention growing rather than receding over the decades. There was more attention paid to 40th anniversary than the 30th 20th or 25th. A service was held at Manchester Cathedral on 6th February 1998, and a small ceremony of remembrance carried out on the Old Trafford pitch the following day. A delayed benefit match for the Munich Disaster Fund was staged at Old Trafford on 18th August which raised nearly one million pounds, although the payment of over £90,000 in expenses to Eric Cantona for his appearance in the game and other deductions led to controversy.
Real Madrid, United’s opponents next week, offered their services after the disaster and played a friendly at Old Trafford on 1st August 1959 for half their usual fee. Their players were still on £50 a man to win the game though, a huge amount compared to the wages of the United players.
It wasn’t all about money with Madrid. Santiago Bernabeu, their legendary chairman, took his players to Salford’s Weaste Cemetery to lay a wreath on Eddie Colman’s grave – as Roger Byrne was cremated and the other dead players were not Mancunians, it was the closest to Old Trafford.
Then his side of European champions like Di Stefano, Gento, Santamaria and Puskas hammered United 6-1. They were so good that the 63,500 crowd applauded them off the pitch at half time.
“It seems odd to lose 6-1 and yet enjoy a match so much,” said United’s David Herd, “but I think I speak for the rest of the team when I say we enjoyed the hiding Real Madrid gave us.”
The wouldn’t have give such a hiding to a full strength Busby Babes. And while modern day Madrid under Jose Mourinho are slight favourites, they won’t give United such a hiding next week.
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