Munich: From the Shadows

Nineteenth of February 1958. United Review, clutched behind backs by gloved hands. The snowflakes had stopped falling. The hysterical hum of 60,000 mourners had subsided into the deepest silence. The grieving masses huddled together in the bitter cold. Some must have hoped they’d wake up soon: that there was no crash, that the Busby Babes carried on. But in those crumpled pages, the reality was clear – 11 blank spaces where once were the names these people held so dear.

Some of those in Old Trafford began to fill in these spaces, as the tannoy instructed. Some began… ‘1 Harry Gregg’, ‘2 Bill Foulkes’, only to stop, feeling they were erasing the memories of ‘3 Roger Byrne’, ‘4 Eddie Colman’ and ‘5 Mark Jones’. Some left it blank. Some filled it all in with the team whose performance that night, 13 days after the Munich Air Disaster, made lifelong believers out of the most cold-hearted football sceptics.

The line-up had been completely unclear. The first place it appeared with any certainty was in that day’s Manchester Evening News: Gregg; Foulkes, Greaves; Goodwin, Cope, HARROP OR CROWTHER, Webster, Taylor, Dawson, Pearson, Hunter.

But, there, in ‘HARROP OR CROWTHER’ represented the stress endured by assistant-turned-manager Jimmy Murphy over that fortnight, for when the Evening News was distributed in Manchester’s streets at 5pm on that February Wednesday, Jimmy still didn’t know his team.

The bringer of news to United fans on their way to Old Trafford, who could provide at least some of the players starting this symbolic game, was the journalist David Meek. He’d been introduced to Reds supporters only the day before as the man “who will be following Manchester United in their soccer adventures.”

He was, just like the players he now wrote about, a replacement – a young man stepping into another man’s shoes long before his time. His predecessor Tom Jackson was one of eight journalists killed in the crash. At the Manchester Evening Chronicle, another young man, Keith Dewhurst, replaced Alf Clarke.

Keith was subbing the final features pages of the Saturday ‘pink’ on Wednesday 6 February when Alf called from Munich to explain the plane had been delayed. A few minutes passed until a follow-up call. The plane was attempting a third take-off. More minutes came and went before the lives of those in that office, and everyone connected with Manchester United, changed for good. The next call came from London. “There have been unconfirmed reports of an accident,” it said. The tragic, gruesome details soon followed.

Not long after, sitting numb amidst the shrill ringing of phones, clattering of typewriters and hum of chatter, one of United’s players was sitting in that office near Keith Dewhurst. Wilf McGuinness, ruled out through injury, had come in after seeing a newspaper placard outside. The newspapermen gave him updates on his friends. He sat with tears in his eyes while they gave him cups of tea.

Dewhurst compiled the list of the ‘dead’, ‘believed saved’ and ‘saved’. A few days later, he was offered a dead man’s job and taken to the Norbreck Hydro, on the cliffs above Blackpool’s North Shore, where Jimmy Murphy had taken what remained of United. Introduced by the Chronicle’s editor, Jimmy gripped Keith’s hand, and his elbow. His hooded eyes blazed into Dewhurst’s and he said, “Never mind criticism! What we need is support!”

Over the following days, as Murphy pulled together something resembling a football team – when he was not attending funerals – Meek and Dewhurst, the team’s new sidekicks, would gather at the end of the swimming pool. Murphy held his press conferences there. Meek thus always associated those days with the smell of chlorine. For Murphy, it all went by in a blur, with that team sheet the main thing on his mind… how to fill that blank team sheet.

Most of United’s senior players were dead, injured or in shock. Reserves became first-teamers overnight, but even that was insufficient. Murphy delved deeper into his orchard – “golden apples,” he had called the Babes – to find those who weren’t quite ripe yet, but would do. The Welshman showed remarkable prescience despite the sleepless chaos of the time. “My main worry is the fear that we are bringing these youngsters into League football too fast – but at the moment what else can I do?”

His list of available players read like “a team of schoolboys.” He needed experience, so he and survivor Bill Foulkes went to Blackpool to talk to veteran Ernie Taylor, who had recently lost his seven-year-old son in a car accident. It was a depressingly neat fit. Taylor had won the FA Cup with both Newcastle and Blackpool and, even if his best years were behind him, provided much-needed experience.

Though Murphy was in, by his own admission, “a mental turmoil through sheer sorrow,” he had to find a way to fashion and inspire a new side while helping the two available survivors – 23-year-old Harry Gregg and Foulkes, three years his senior – to process the horror of their darkest days. Foulkes remembered this time as “nothing more than blank misery.”

Someone had to ask Murphy for his team. And then take his answer that there wasn’t one. And so the cranking began at the Phillips Park Press and a blank team sheet was printed.

Fans arrived at Old Trafford early on Wednesday 19 February. They bought their programme. In it, they found missing the team and the columns of Matt Busby – fighting for his life in hospital – Tom Jackson (dead), Alf Clarke (dead) and the cartoons of George Butterworth and Frank Smart (mourning). United Review had hardly altered format for 12 years, so stable were United. But not anymore.

Whatever team sheet Murphy had written was meaningless until an hour before kick-off when HARROP – an inexperienced 20-year-old – was crossed out for new signing CROWTHER.

Stan Crowther. Expensive, at £18,000, but not glamorous. A tough wing-half who would never truly fit in, but filled a hole. He met the motley crew that were his new team-mates at Old Trafford. They had driven from Norbreck with new trainer Jack Crompton, the 1948 FA Cup-winning goalkeeper who returned to help out.

“We had done our best to remain cheerful on the bus from the Norbreck,” Foulkes said, “but when we reached the ground the atmosphere was unnerving, somehow unnatural.”

Inside the dressing room, silent but for the brushing of material and clicking of studs, the young boys felt like imposters. Full-back Ian Greaves could only think of Roger Byrne, the man he was replacing. Murphy could only picture those he’d lost, too. But he found enough within him to give one of football’s great team talks:

“Play hard for yourselves, play hard for the players who are dead, play hard for those still in hospital, and play hard for the great name of Manchester United!”

As the United Review was clutched by gloved hands in the falling snow, it was clear this was a night fuller with symbolism than a Shakespeare play: the programme with its 11 empty spaces (something missing), the red-and-white fan scarves with the names of the 1957 title-winning team stitched into them, a black diamond added by the names of the dead (something added). Black added to red and white… United colours.

Foulkes, United’s new captain, thought he resembled a ghost when leading the team out. Although he survived with hardly a nick, when he and Gregg had returned to the Munich crash site, they found Bill’s pack of cards shorn of a half centimetre. He had ducked down. Luckily.

The Old Trafford crowd included non-football fans, and those who had travelled from afar. Denis Law was one. Playing at Huddersfield at the time, he said: “We just had to be there.” He and a friend paid eight times the normal price of a ticket, bought their programme and paused upon the blank names. Everyone did.

As the team was announced – with Crowther included – some filled it in. Harry Gregg, survivor and goalkeeper. Bill Foulkes, survivor and captain. Ian Greaves, 23-year-old left-back. Freddie Goodwin, described as “the best reserve half-back in the country.” Ronnie Cope, the reserve centre-half. Stan Crowther, new signing from Aston Villa. Colin Webster, Welsh international. Alex Dawson, 17-year-old forward lighting up the FA Youth Cup. Ernie Taylor, new signing from Blackpool, aged 32. Mark Pearson, 18-year-old local lad. Shay Brennan, 20-year-old inside-forward fresh off National Service.

Then the ground went silent. Profoundly silent. Some clutched their programmes. Some looked at the ground, others to the sky, others across the pitch where their heroes would never play again. Some just closed their eyes.

The roar followed, and a constant hum resumed. They hid the sobs of some of those in the crowd. But with the referee’s whistle, the pain could pause for Murphy, Foulkes and Gregg, concentration and determination in its place.

At 7:58pm, Shay Brennan scored. His right-footed in-swinging corner, he remembered, “swung beautifully under the glaring floodlights wafted further towards goal by a gust of wind and curled over the ‘keeper’s head into the net.”

A different kind of silence followed. The short intake of breath. And then the eruption of noise. “Hats and scarves flew into the air, many never to be seen by their owners again, but who cared?” recalled one spectator. “There were tears too, as never before could a solitary goal have meant so much to so many.”

United won 3-0. Brennan scored two, Dawson one, and Cope and young Pearson stood out. ‘Their maturity, polish, and skill left one wondering what other magic is hidden away in Old Trafford,’ wrote one reporter.

The Daily Express said United ‘were born again.’ Another summed up the feeling of the nation. ‘There’s the crystallisation of the British idea of sport! There’s the triumph over adversity we all enjoy! Well done, Manchester United.’

‘If ever there was vindication of a long-term policy this was it,’ posited the Manchester Guardian. And they were right. It was Busby and Murphy’s unwavering commitment to youth and developing their own that had allowed it. They’d only signed two players to complement the two Munich survivors.

The Mirror’s front page claimed, ‘Something of a shadow seemed to lift when United won.’ It did. Foulkes wept and a teary Jimmy Murphy declared: “Now we know that the future has its sunshine.”

But the shadow returned. It returned in the reality of United’s situation. Jimmy now had to pick a team for Saturday’s league visit of Nottingham Forest. But not just for the first team, also the Reserves, A Team and B Team, who would all resume their fixtures. And Cope had a strained back, Pearson a bruised foot and Brennan a bruised shin.

And then Duncan Edwards died and the world seemed a truly dark place once again. Despite the magnificent Cup triumph, a new black cloud filled the air.

But where once there had been grief and uncertainty, now it was only grief. There was no blank team sheet this time around. There were 11 names of men whose performance against Sheffield Wednesday had made United admired the world around. There were also new columns: Keith Dewhurst had one, Eric Thornton the other.

‘Although the United Review has lost two wonderful friends I feel sure we have gained two new ones,’ wrote the Editor, who reluctantly replaced Busby’s column himself.

Thornton noted: ‘There are so many empty spaces, so many missing faces. But life must go on, and so must United’s ambitious planning for the future if the club is going to rise again from the ashes of its former glory.’

Before Forest’s visit, an interdenominational service of remembrance was held pre-match on the halfway line, dedicated especially to Edwards, whose coffin was being flown back from Munich at that moment.

A post-war record crowd of 66,123 attended, walking through Mancunian snow to do so. As on Wednesday, they paid a silent tribute. Meek called it “one of the most memorable scenes in the history of British football.” Then the team paid their tribute, too.

Forest led but United levelled with 20 minutes remaining. Dawson’s goal “brought as much hysteria as I have heard on the football grounds of the world,” added Meek. And United probably deserved to win, inspired by the diminutive Taylor, who orchestrated the young boys around him.

The Weekly Dispatch commented: ‘For the second time in a week the greatness of Manchester United as a club, if not as a team, was shown at Old Trafford. The loyalty of Manchester trekking through the snow to support the new United was shown in a remarkable post-war record attendance of 66,123. So this great city expressed again the unique bond which exists between it, the club, and its players.’

The writer Bob Ferrier said, “This United team is more than a shadow.”

Indeed. No more emptiness above dotted lines. No blank team sheet.

Instead, a philosophy that has lived forever more: UNITED WILL GO ON.

This featured originally appeared in United Review, our beloved matchday programme, for Manchester United v Crystal Palace on 2 February 2025.