If you can make one heap of all your winningsOver this on Wednesday, pause a while all who care for soccer, nay sport. For on that day, a few good men were cut down in the prime of their lives and a team that could have been never was.
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
(Rudyard Kipling, If)
If only the British European Airways Flight 609 not tried to take off for a third time, maybe Manchester United would have been European conquerors 10 years before George Best, Dennis Law and Bobby Charlton and their mates were crowned champions. If only Duncan Edwards and six of his teammates not died, Matt Busby would have taken a team harnessed primarily from local talent to the pinnacle of Europe that much earlier.
Busby’s rising from the dead and rebuilding the team is a lesson in never giving up we could all draw strength from. It is a lesson which lies at the heart of one of football’s greatest-ever institutions. It is something Manchester United typified again at White Hart Lane on Saturday. Watching Carlos Tevez steal a point when all looked lost, Sir Bobby would have gone home happy that 50 years on, the spirit still lives. One that was sowed in one of modern sport’s greatest tragedies.
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