I feel like fifteen again.
It's very difficult to be fifteen on the 25th anniversary of the Munich air crash. Especially if you're living in South Manchester. Would you believe that a few months earlier I had written to Jimmy Hill suggesting that it might be a good idea if Football Focus had a little feature on it. And Jimmy Hill wrote me back a very nice letter thanking me for my suggestion, and while, of course, it never actually said 'we hadn't thought of that' it left a feeling that they were taking my suggestion very seriously. Which is why I won't hear anything against Jimmy Hill.
It was a different age, media wise. Today it's all over the media. When so many words are written, it is difficult to add any more. The survivors - those that are still alive - are getting old. Bobby Charlton's losing his hair. The public who remember it are getting old. If such a crash happened now, there would be far fewer casualties. Even in the Eighties, they said, if medical science was further advanced in 1958, Duncan Edwards would have survived. It used to bother me that people said that Duncan Edwards was the greatest footballer ever. How did they know, where was the evidence, had they tested this with counter-evidence. With age comes wisdom, and I realise that such a statement doesn't need evidential support. It's not provable, it;s not disprovable. People say it perhaps because they unthinkingly parrot what they've read in the newspaper, or maybe because wishing makes it so. It's like 'They shall grow not old as we are that left grow old'. As human beings we accept the deaths of those in old age of natural causes, people who have had the chance to make their mark and live their life. When it's young people who die, it is much harder to understand. Ironically, the footballers who died at Munich (and the journalists and Pressmen, who would have been older) would only have been a tiny fraction of the young men who died that year, a miniscule fraction of those that would have died fifteen years previously. Many of them would have gone on to become unremarkable footballers, forgotten by all but the most obsessive loyalists of the minor clubs they would have ended up at. By dying young, without reaching their potential, they are remembered forever.
And the lasting legacy of Munich is a the phenomenon of Manchester United. Obscured now because of a decade and a half of success, confused by the big business capitalism that is now global football, but the unique position of Manchester United, that makes the club different from even the Italian and Spanish giants, is that human legacy of affection created in the aftermath of Munich, and probably little understood by the majority of people who call themselves fans.
A while back, my mother said "I don't remember them making much fuss on the tenth anniversary..."
