Busby

First, someone who occupies a rare place in our hearts,

a sportsman who cuts across the demarcation lines

that separate those people who love sport and those who hate it.

As a player, his skills graced the game.

As a manager, his teams adorned it.

Ladies and gentlemen, Sir Matt Busby.

You're the most famous man in soccer in this country

and indeed, I suppose, in the world.

You were more than a manager there. You were the boss, weren't you, really?

- Well, er... - Come on.

Quite a lot of people said that, yeah.

When you look back,

do you think that there was any part of it

that caused you to sacrifice,

and when you look back, do you think, "Well, it really wasn't worth it"?

Oh, yes.

We felt in a team.

If we were trailing 2-0,

we always had a feeling that we'd win 3-2.

Those last-minute goals,

the comebacks,

even the defeats,

are all part of this great football club of ours.

I felt like a great family.

Matt Busby is without doubt

the greatest manager who ever lived.

I remember walking the corridors

up to the manager's office at Old Trafford.

The smell of Sir Matt Busby's pipe...

I can smell it now.

The door would always be open.

I look back now and think,

"We should have gone in more and talked to him more." But you were scared.

This was like a god.

My mind goes back over the years,

to the day of my birth in a small village in Scotland.

I was born in a Pitman's Cottage.

It was a small mining village,

nothing else but mines.

The people themselves

were brought up in a faith which was football.

Nothing else ever seemed to take place.

Nobody else seemed to talk about anything else other than football.

- (INTERVIEWER) Was your father a miner? - He was, yes.

Was he also a footballer?

Yes, he played in a local junior team

and I understand had a lot of ability.

But the war came on, of course.

Then my father was killed in the First World War.

I scarcely remember him.

I was the oldest of four. There were three girls below me.

And my mother, a very young age, she was.

She had a tremendous influence on my life

and of course the rest of the family's.

She was a real Scotch type of mother,

who put her foot down at the right time,

and she brought us up with an idea of having some common sense

and trying to be a citizen.

And if you had a job to do, to do a job well.

If you're speaking about Matt Busby and what he was like,

Busby, like any man of his age, was a product of his time.

There was quite a lot of depression in Lanarkshire

with the coal mines and that type of thing.

I'd been taken away from school.

Before I knew where I was,

I'd gone working in the mines to try and earn a few

shillings, a few pounds, to help at home.

The poverty that was in Britain was shocking.

You were brought up in a mining village

who were never thought of by governments as anything.

We had tough upbringings to etch out a living in.

When you think of back then,

the working class were getting paid a pittance.

Miners were treated like shit, for use of a better word.

They were treated like slaves.

For working-class people everywhere,

one of the great ways of escaping

the poverty, deprivation,

marginalisation of a working-class existence was football.

I started playing a little football again.

Well, my mother wasn't very keen.

I went on a trial with Manchester City.

And anyway, when I came back,

in the meantime, they'd influenced me to sign for them.

Oldest manufacturing centre in the world,

the cradle of modern industry.

The old city's never stopped growing.

And the more she's grown, the more it seemed she'd got to grow.

Manchester City, a club with over half a century of history.

Forty years ago, it became known by its present name.

Today, Wilfred Wild, the secretary manager,

receives thousands of pounds in entrance fees.

Coming down about 17 and a half, just under 18 year old,

and the first time coming from home,

I knew I was trying to better myself

but the place was strange and for a time, I wasn't too happy about it.

I had a form of a complex at the time.

I think it was a form of an inferiority complex.

I thought the first team players were gods.

And during this spell, I didn't do too well.

It was probably the best part of a year and a half, kicking around,

and at one time, I thought about going home.

I was so disappointed, disillusioned in every way.

We had, uh, I was in lodgings with

an older player who was in the first team,

a chap called Phil McCloy

who, when he came in and saw me with this case,

he says, "What's this you're doing?" I said,

"Well, I feel as though I'm getting nowhere here."

He says, "What's the case packed for?" I said, "I'm going to go home."

"You're going to go home? What are you going home to?"

And of course he talked me into staying.

Busby's sense of judgement when he's taking a pass

is one of his great assets

and he can trap a ball with unfailing precision.

- (JOURNALIST) Are you pleased he did? - I'm delighted he did!

For the second time in the lives of most of us,

we are at war.

The flames of war eat at the heart of Manchester.

In one of the fiercest raids of the German Blitzkrieg on Britain,

a storm of bombs wreaked havoc.

Manchester will remember the horrors of that attack

as long as the heart of the North continues to beat.

Many a time I used to think how miserable life was.

The one thing they did try and knock into you was the value of leadership.

Busby had this aura about him.

He was quiet. I never heard him raise his voice.

I never heard him swear.

He made you want to do things for him.

So Matt had a great respect for human beings in general.

That's why you ask anybody that met Matt,

Matt treated people terrifically.

He knew everybody

and he made everybody feeling important.

When the war came to an end,

I, like many others, had to face some facts.

Some hard facts.

I was about 36 years of age.

My days as a player were numbered.

I couldn't live in memories.

Yet I couldn't think of leaving this wonderful game of football.

So I decided to try my hand as a manager.

He arrived in Manchester

to speak to the chairman in uniform

because he had still to be demobbed from the army.

Even though he had no management experience at all.

So he had a very firm idea of what he wanted.

I mean, mining communities are very close knit.

The sense of cooperation, working together,

that is a form of socialism in action.

That flows from his working-class background.

He had a vision of a club,

a family, he thought of it as,

where nobody was bigger than the club

which was one of his mantras, always.

They will absorb the culture and the club

which is, "We're all family,

we're in this together,

they will behave in a certain way

and they will play in a certain way."

What kind of quality is it that you look for

in a footballer that will go into your side?

First of all, I look for ability.

That is essential. Natural ability.

I see natural ability...

I like to see people that can play,

that have got control,

that have got a mind.

I love to see a player with vision,

somebody that can look at a places,

look at a field and determine what he's going to do.

I love to see a player playing with heart.

And I also naturally want them to be of a kind.

He just felt that his duty was to entertain.

This was just after the war,

when people had been five, six years in the war

and they wanted something to enjoy.

Men who worked in these factories,

and they're working long hours and doing dirty jobs

and they're going home on the bus or on their bikes,

they come in on a Saturday afternoon to be entertained.

He was a big, handsome, imposing man.

He never looked in any way stressed or perturbed.

And he beguiled people,

he beguiled Harold Hardman and the directors of Manchester United.

He was offered a contract as manager of Manchester United.

This was people being impressed, seeing Matt as a leader.

Someone in whom they could place trust.

Somebody who could command respect

of people who wouldn't normally give respect

to a footballer or indeed to a working-class person.

It was not an easy assignment.

The ground had been blitzed.

They'd an overdraft at the bank.

I had no experience as a manager.

I felt they were taking a great risk in appointing me.

Guiding United is ex-star Matt Busby,

keeping a player's eye on the first team workout.

All I had was certain ideas as to what a manager should do,

faith in those ideas