‘Victory was no closure. I still think about them’

As well as most of the Manchester United players who had overcome Benfica in the sweltering heat of Wembley a couple of hours earlier, Busby’s audience at the post-match banquet included the parents of Duncan Edwards and Eddie Colman, two of those who had perished in Munich, and some of the surviving players, such as Jackie Blanchflower, Kenny Morgans and Johnny Berry. If euphoria was in the air, so too was an unspoken sadness. John Aston, one of the heroes on the pitch against Benfica that evening, reflected some years later that it was “a strange night”.

It was stranger still for the fact that there was something else missing. Or someone else. While George Best drank himself into what would become a sadly familiar oblivion - “it was the greatest day of my footballing life and everything is a complete blank” – Bobby Charlton was upstairs in his room, too shattered to move. Five times he tried to get up off his bed to go downstairs, but each time he felt nauseous and three times he fainted. Finally he conceded defeat, leaving his wife, Norma, to join the party while he collapsed on the bed, succumbing to exhaustion. Nobby Stiles speculated that his teammate was suffering “an emotional overload”. Charlton maintains to this day that he was simply dehydrated.

All the while, another Munich survivor stood stoically in the ballroom. Stoical was Bill Foulkes’s way. He had worked down the mines in St Helens and kept his feelings bottled up. Foulkes had done that for the ten years since Munich and he was not going to let his guard down now. When Charlton collapsed to his knees at the final whistle at Wembley, the 36-year-old centre half’s instinct was to drag him to his feet. Instead, he left Charlton to his private thoughts and sought out Busby, with whom he shared a bear hug. If Busby was euphoric and Charlton exhausted, Foulkes would later reflect that nothing had yet sunk in.

Just short of 40 years on, Foulkes shuffles up the stairs of United’s youth academy building in Carrington. Along with Charlton, Morgans and Albert Scanlon, his fellow survivors, he has come to talk about the 50th anniversary of the Munich disaster. Charlton speaks movingly, Morgans eloquently and Scanlon with even a touch of humour about the friends they lost. Foulkes, though, is at a loss. Whereas the other three lost consciousness at some point in the crash, Foulkes witnessed many of the horrors of Munich as he joined Harry Gregg, the goalkeeper, in trying to find survivors in the wreckage.

He starts to talk about it – “I didn’t see people sort of being dead, or anything like that” – but then he trails off, shakes his head and looks at you with the saddest of eyes. “I feel as though I am out of it and can’t really get a grasp of it,” he says apologetically. It is clear that he finds the whole thing difficult, but Foulkes feels that is because he kept his memories, his emotions, buried for so long. “I wish now that we had spoken about it more because we are at a loss now,” he says. “I survived, but at a cost to me. Emotionally, especially. I also had pains in the head and I didn’t get any sort of help for it. I just carried on playing.”

And playing and playing. Foulkes went on to make 688 appearances for United, famously scoring the dramatic late goal against Real Madrid that sent them through to the European Cup final in 1968. The subsequent victory at Wembley is usually characterised as Busby’s triumph, or Charlton’s, but the story of Foulkes, who, along with Gregg, played for United within 13 days of the Munich tragedy, seems equally moving now, perhaps even more so. How sad it is that, despite a successful coaching career in the United States, Norway and Japan, financial hardship forced him to sell the mementoes of his career in 1992. The shirt he wore in the European Cup final fetched £1,800 and his winner’s medal £11,000.

Now he has only the memories, themselves no longer sharp at the age of 76. At one point he confuses the 1968 final with the 1958 FA Cup Final, which United lost to Bolton Wanderers. Again he apologises, then he rediscovers the thread and talks of the emotions he felt at Wembley, emotions that are still raw after being left untouched for so long. “I felt sadness more than anything else because my thoughts were with the boys that died,” he says. “They were my friends.” Did it give him closure, the feeling that he and his teammates had done something for the memory of the lost Babes? “There was never closure,” he says, “because we still think about them now. We discussed it over a meeting before the game, saying we had to do this for the boys. It started to take over really.”

In the minds of Charlton and Foulkes, that certainly seems to have been the case. But others recall that, beyond that prematch meeting, the M-word was taboo at Old Trafford, just as it had been for much of the previous decade. As obvious as it may seem now, there was not an automatic link made between the events of 1958, the journey back from a European Cup tie in Belgrade, and the opportunity to win the trophy in later years.

Even in the media, the association between tragedy and triumph was not made. In The Times, on the morning of the game, Geoffrey Green, the venerable Football Correspondent, made only the most passing reference to what had happened ten years earlier. The next morning, in his match report, there is not even that. For better or for worse, there was no grief culture.

But people were not infallible. David Sadler, another of the 1968 heroes, remembers that Busby “suddenly looked very old that night”. Charlton, in the photographs, looks weary and, for all his protestations, is perceived by those who know him best to have been exhausted emotionally as well as physically on the night he lifted the European Cup. Had he been there to see Busby take the microphone, and put a North Lanarkshire twist on What a Wonderful World, that theory might just have been proven.

And all the while, in a corner of the ballroom, Foulkes stood quietly, keeping his emotions in check. The next day, though, he chose to play golf while his teammates embarked on an open-top bus tour of Manchester. Nobody ever asked him why, but the truth was that he simply could not face it.

Making of history

First round, first leg September 20, 1967 Manchester United 4 (Sadler 2, Law 2) Hibernians (Malta) 0

Second leg September 27 Hibernians (Malta) 0 Manchester United 0

Second round, first leg November 15 Sarajevo 0 Manchester United 0

Second leg November 29 Manchester United 2 (Aston, Best) Sarajevo 1

Quarter-final, first leg February 28, 1968 Manchester United 2 (Kidd, Florenski og) Gornik Zabrze 0

Second leg March 13 Gornik Zabrze 1 Manchester United 0

Semi-final, first leg April 24 Manchester United 1 (Best) Real Madrid 0

Second leg May 15 Real Madrid 3 Manchester United 3 (Sadler, Foulkes, Zoco og)

Final Wembley, May 29, 1968 Manchester United 4 (Charlton 53, 99, Best 93, Kidd 94) Benfica 1 (Graca 79)

Manchester United: Stepney, Dunne, Foulkes, Stiles, Brennan, Sadler, Crerand, Charlton, Best, Kidd, Aston. Benfica: Henrique, Adolfo, Cruz, Graca, Humberto, Jacinto, Augusto, Eus?bio, Torres, Coluna, Simoes.