8/27/2023 0 Comments Download man united glory days![]() There was no shortage of lore and history around Old Trafford – the place was built on it and A Strange Kind of Glory wouldn't be half the book it is without it all.īut it’s also a snapshot taken just before the rocket went off. To read it now feels a little like what a book on NASA might have been like in 1968. It was published in 1991, less than 12 months short of the first Premier League title and the ending of United's 26-year trophy drought. I had a great day talking to Tommy Docherty, a great man, great fun. Denis Law, Bobby Charlton, Frank O'Farrell, Jimmy Murphy's family. As I say, the fact that he was involved at all gave me the go-ahead to talk to everybody else. It didn’t matter that he had a fondness for me, there was no way he was telling me anything. But I have to say, he wasn’t engaging at all as an interviewee. “He was paternalistic with me when I went to interview him because I had been there as a kid. So that was the man I was searching for in the book. ![]() He was formed by the General Strike, and the Scottish miners were the hardest bastards and they held out for the longest. He was in the mines in west Scotland when he was 15 years old. But instead he sold me to York City in the Third Division for four grand. He could have sold me to Birmingham City, they were in the First Division. “He did something terrible to me, really, when I was a kid. And, like many charming people, he had real steel behind all of it. “Busby was an awesome man, in the proper sense of the word. For all that Dunphy was thankful for Busby's co-operation, the book doesn't gloss over the darker side of the great man. It was also, in part, a social history of the game in England, as well as an often brutal and unvarnished rendering of the Manchester United origin story. It was so much more than a Busby biography – although it was certainly that. What resulted was a book of extraordinary scope and depth. Matt spoke to me and, once his imprimatur was on it, everyone else did so as well." And through him I got the family's co-operation, which was helpful. So I gave him a few quid and asked if he could talk to his father for me. He's a very nice fella but he just isn't a businessman. Sandy was a bookie and his business hadn't done well. "I was friendly with Sandy Busby, Matt's son. It thought it was a great opportunity to tell the history of soccer through the prism of Matt Busby, this one extraordinary man, which is what he really was. “This was the book that I really wanted to write. He did something terrible to me, really, when I was a kid. I spent six months talking to people there and in Scotland. So whenever that was, that's when I was there. I was sitting in this little apartment in Manchester the night she got shafted by the Tories, watching it on Channel 4 news. "I remember being there for the end of Thatcher. He took a flat in the city and set about researching the book. The one didn’t cause the other or anything but it was, on the whole, no harm to have something new to throw himself into after Italia ’90 and all that. So it was that, in the autumn of 1990, just after he had become the country’s most notorious television pundit, Dunphy left Dublin to live in Manchester for six months. And it’s not often you can say that about anything you do.” “But that book, it’s the one occasion that I have always been able to look back and go, ‘Yeah, that’s as good as it could be.’ It’s a piece of work that I’m very, very pleased with. Photograph: Charman & Ley/Mirrorpix/Getty Images Manchester United manager Matt Busby at Wembley Stadium after Manchester United’s FA Cup Final defeat to Aston Villa on May 4th, 1957. And we all know that we’ve put out plenty of stuff over the years that didn’t work or that was only okay or wasn’t great. When you write for long enough, you know in your bones what’s good and what isn’t. “You never think that anything you’ve done is as good as it should have been or could have been. And though he is gratified at the interest, he can't resist a dig at himself all the same. The Irish Times is calling to talk about A Strange Kind of Glory, his 1991 book on Matt Busby, Manchester United and so much more. Resolutely himself, with all the good and bad that implies. But he's as full of mischief and contradictions as ever he was. First one will be done at 12.05 – can you call back at 12.10? Grand, talk to you then.ĭunphy will be 76 in August and has left the house only a handful of times since last March. Two podcasts to record tomorrow, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. Eamon Dunphy answers the phone mid-conversation.
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