LITMIR.BIZ

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Mancunians to be very much like Glaswegians. They were warm and would come and talk to you, it was that working-class thing.

      I hadn’t been at Old Trafford long when one evening I went along to see a United youth team match. I had heard that our youth team were pretty impressive and I wanted to see for myself. I sat on the trainer’s bench with the coach Jack Crompton, but you didn’t need to be that close to see who the star of this game was – United’s right-winger, a skinny boy with thick black hair. His ball control was a dream. He gave you the impression he could beat his man any way he wanted, although he was inclined to take on too many at a time. I couldn’t have been more impressed.

      ‘See that winger,’ I said to Jack at half-time, ‘you have a great prospect there.’

      Jack didn’t even turn round. He just nodded his head and said, ‘I know.’ I thought Jack was being a bit arrogant and that he could have shown a bit more enthusiasm.

      ‘The way he carries the ball, his positioning, his touch, his speed,’ I went on, ‘he’s easily the best player I’ve seen at this level.’ Jack let me talk on for a while then, in a father to son manner, he put me fully in the picture.

      ‘Paddy,’ he said, ‘you’ve made no great discovery. Everybody at Old Trafford knows about this boy. He’s a wonderful prospect.’

      Even though United were going through a difficult period, the lad was about sixteen, so they had to wait until he grew older and developed, and hope that nothing would happen to take the shine off what they thought was a football gem. His name, as if you haven’t guessed it, was George Best.

      The first place Noreen and I lived in when we moved to Manchester was some digs with a Mrs Scott on Marsland Road, Sale. The rent was £6 a week. Even though I was United’s second most expensive signing, there was no star treatment. In fact, the traffic was so noisy outside that it drove me mental. Mrs Scott was a United nut and a lovely person. She wasn’t a Catholic, but she used to go to the local church and pray for United every Saturday morning. It was hard living in digs because we’d never lived away from home before, nor under the same roof, albeit in different beds. Noreen used to return to Glasgow once a month, but I couldn’t because I had to play.

      Bobby and Norma Charlton invited us out to dinner on one of our first weekends in Manchester. I’d always respected and admired him as a player. He was quite shy, so I appreciated him inviting us to a pub in Flixton near where he lived. Bobby asked me what I wanted to drink and I asked for a sherry. I wasn’t into alcohol and I didn’t even drink sherry, but I thought it would be a sensible choice. He did a double take, thinking that I was such a big Glaswegian drinker that I drank neat sherry instead of beer. We had a smashing night, but I hardly drank anything. The goalkeeper Harry Gregg collared me on Monday morning and asked me how Saturday night had gone.

      ‘Fine.’ I said. ‘Why?’

      ‘Because Bobby was shitting himself that you would go potty if the waiter spilt something or someone said something to you.’

      ‘Am I that bad?’ I asked Harry. I couldn’t believe that I had a reputation for being a snapper after just a few weeks living in Manchester. Actually, the reputation stuck. Denis Law once said, ‘If Pat starts, the best thing to do is put out the lights and lie on the floor.’ Denis also used to tell me that I had two speeds – slow and dead stop. I don’t think that I am bad tempered, but if someone did something to me I could be.

      When the weather finally began to thaw and United started playing, I wasn’t an immediate success. My first competitive game was against Blackpool who had my nemesis Pat Quinn, previously of Motherwell, playing for them. The game was at Old Trafford on 23 February. The crowd was 43,121. Old Trafford was big, but three sides of the ground were predominantly terracing and it was no grander than Ibrox or Celtic Park. In the following months I would play at smarter stadiums like Goodison Park and Highbury. It wasn’t until the sweeping cantilever stand went up at Old Trafford for the 1966 World Cup that the stadium began to be considered one of the best in Britain.

      New players take time to adjust to their surroundings and I was no different. I over-hit passes and because I didn’t know how people played I had to get used to my team-mates. I wasn’t the player I knew I could be, but I always felt that Matt respected me, especially as he sought my opinions about other players he was considering signing.

      Sir Alex Ferguson does it now, as in the case of Cristiano Ronaldo. He saw for himself how good Ronaldo was when Sporting Lisbon played United in a pre-season friendly in 2003, but when his players came into the dressing room raving about him that made him more certain that he should sign him. He did the same with Eric Cantona in 1992 after Steve Bruce and Gary Pallister told him that the Frenchman was easily the best player they had come up against.

      Matt asked Denis about me and he asked him about Jim Baxter, too. He wanted to know about players’ backgrounds and what type of person they were. I was told that Denis said that while Jimmy was probably the better player, his lifestyle could lead to problems. Denis said that I had what it took to be a Manchester United player because I looked after myself and wasn’t a big drinker or gambler. Matt had an idea of what constituted a Manchester United player and was assessing whether players he liked would be good professionals or trouble makers. His judgement was based on far more than an individual having talent.

      It was sensible of Matt to seek opinions from his players because players know which opponents are difficult to play against. I felt honoured that Matt respected my views so soon after joining. He asked me about the Dundee defender Ian Ure. It seems incredible now, but Dundee had a great team and were playing in the semi-final of the European Cup against Milan. I said that Ian was a good player, but that he struggled in the air a little bit. Dundee lost in Milan and three of their goals were from headers. Having seen that game, Matt came to me the next day and thanked me for my thoughts. Ian later came to United, but it wasn’t Matt who signed him.

      One thing I found refreshing in England was the lack of sectarian abuse during games. Surprisingly, Rangers players were one of the few of our rivals in Scotland who had never given us abuse, but at other grounds it was commonplace. In many grounds we played, opponents and fans would call us Fenian bastards for 90 minutes. I liked the absence of that in England.

      The perception was that United were big spenders after my transfer fee and the record £115,000 spent on Denis Law a year earlier. But the club wasn’t flush. When Matt had gone for Denis the chairman Harold Hardman was reluctant to spend that much money. He had been at the club long enough to know United were unable to pay high wages and extravagance didn’t appeal to him. The Manchester bookmaker Johnny Foy, who was a great friend of Matt’s, offered to underwrite the bid for Denis. United never made this public, but in the end I think United gave the impression that they had paid the money themselves, when they had in fact accepted the underwriting from Foy.

      Things started to go right for me by the time we played Southampton in the semi-final of the FA Cup at Villa Park on 27 April. It was not a good game on a terrible pitch. Denis Law scored the only goal in front of 65,000 but we went back to the Cromford Club, which was owned by Matt’s friend Paddy McGrath, to celebrate after the game. Gigi Peronace was in there. He was a football agent in the days before football agents. He was great friends with Denis, having been responsible for his move to Torino. I must have been doing something right because he asked me if I was interested in joining Roma. Jean Busby, Matt’s wife, overheard and said, ‘He’s going nowhere.’ Coming to England was a big enough jump for me.

      Matt paid for champagne for the whole team that night. A lot of Manchester people saw us in the Cromford Club, and as the word got passed from mouth to mouth the stories got more colourful. Manchester was like a village when it came to gossip. Apparently we were all plastered and Matt was worse than anyone. Nonsense. We all had a few, but we’d just reached the FA Cup Final so why couldn’t we celebrate?

      People said that Matt was so close to his top players that he could not bring himself to discipline them. Rubbish. Did people really imagine that United could be successful if there was no discipline? Every great manager has to be a disciplinarian. Matt was like a father figure, but fathers are sometimes required to kick you up the backside and he could

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