Fortunately, Bobby Charlton’s training was in the hands of Jimmy Murphy, one of the toughest and shrewdest taskmasters in British football. Like Busby, a practising Catholic born in a coalmining village, Murphy hailed from the Rhondda valley. He had been a ferocious wing-half for Wales and West Brom in the inter-war years before Matt brought him to Old Trafford as his assistant. Murphy could have been a great manager himself, as he proved in taking Wales to the quarter-finals of the World Cup in 1958 in Sweden, but he preferred to remain at United, turning down lucrative offers from Arsenal and continental sides. Ex-United player John Docherty says that he made the right decision: ‘Jimmy was magnificent but he was a natural number two. I think he would have found it hard to be under the constant glare of the press. He liked working with players, being with kids, knocking the shit out of you on the training ground to make you into a better footballer. All the players of my time will tell you that Jimmy Murphy was our greatest single influence, because he could make or break us.’ It is a sentiment echoed by Bobby Charlton himself, who once wrote: ‘There have been few better teachers of the game and I am greatly in his debt. Alf Ramsey helped me a lot when he became manager of England and so, of course, in many ways, did Matt Busby. But Jimmy got to my guts.’
Murphy could hardly have been a greater contrast to his serene, dignified boss. He was a man of dark Celtic passion: fiery, temperamental, aggressive, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed, ‘with a voice like a cement mixer in full throttle’, in the vivid phrase of Busby’s. ‘He shuffled these little steps,’ says John Aston, ‘a bit like Jimmy Cagney. He looked like a gangster. But he was a very warm, emotional man.’ His favourite expression, which summed up his philosophy, was ‘get stuck in’. Nobby Lawton, another contemporary of Bobby’s, gave me this memory: ‘He toughened us up, taught us to stand up for ourselves. When we played five-a-side at the training ground, Jimmy would join in and kick you to the ground. “What’s going on here?” “That’s what it’s like in professional football,” Jimmy would reply. His team talks were inspiring. After listening to one of them, I could not wait to get out on the pitch. All the managers I met in my career after Jimmy were ordinary.’
Several of Bobby’s contemporaries say that he was a favourite of Jimmy’s. But this was only because Jimmy, who was as brilliant a judge of a player as Matt Busby, knew that Bobby had a unique gift. He therefore gave individual tuition to Bobby in the evenings and on Sunday mornings, putting him through a rigorous training schedule to mould him into a true professional. In the Sun in 1975 Murphy explained: ‘Bobby was loaded with talent but it needed harnessing. He was one of the hardest pupils I ever had to work on. He had so much going for him, perhaps too much. We had to bully him.’ For example, one of Bobby’s biggest weaknesses was his love of hitting long, 50-yard balls, and then standing to admire the result. Jimmy kept drumming into him the need to be part of a cohesive team build-up, moving with other players, being prepared to make a quick pass and then getting ready for the return. ‘Keep it simple, give it to a red shirt,’ Jimmy would remind him. As Bobby explained in a Sunday Telegraph article in 1972: ‘I thought that the first thing I had to do as an inside-forward was to show how I could pass. But the full-back would cut it off and three or four people would be put out of the game. I was just showing off. Jimmy showed me the importance of the short game, that I had to work for the glory of the team, not for myself.’
Murphy also worked on building up Bobby’s stamina. On Sundays, when everyone else had a day off, Jimmy took Bobby into the middle of the training ground, then proceeded to kick balls to all four corners of the field and demand that Bobby chase them. Even when Bobby was an exhausted, breathless wreck, Murphy carried on smashing his long balls out of the centre-circle, yelling, ‘No-one has died of a heart attack on the pitch with me.’ One Sunday, Bobby had grown so sick of this routine that he dared to challenge Jimmy.
‘Why are you always on my back? Why don’t you get on to the others?’
‘Listen, son,’ said Jimmy, putting his arm around Bobby’s shoulder, ‘we’ve got a lot of good young players here. Some of them will make it; some of them won’t. We feel certain you will. That’s why we give you so much of our time. Listen and learn.’ Bobby never argued with Jimmy after that.
As a schoolboy, Bobby had been renowned for the power of his shooting and though he was naturally right-footed, he had been almost as devastating with his left. But this was another aspect of his game where Jimmy Murphy felt that there was room for improvement. Emphasizing the need for equal strength in either foot, he made Bobby spend hours kicking a ball from long range at a wall behind the Stretford End at Old Trafford. By drawing a line on the wall at a height of three feet and telling Bobby to hit below it, Jimmy taught Bobby to keep the ball down as he shot. But he never tried to stifle Bobby’s urge to shoot from long range. In an article in 1991, Bobby explained how he developed his scoring potential under Murphy’s tutelage. ‘Most of my goals came from outside the box – I was always encouraged by Jimmy Murphy to have a shot if the window of opportunity presented itself. I used to practice against a brick wall at Old Trafford. I spent my afternoons perfecting my timing and building up my confidence.’ It is a tribute to Bobby’s diligence that many of those closest to him could not even tell that he was born right-footed. His own brother Jack wrote in his autobiography, ‘People often ask me, “Which was your Bobby’s natural foot in his playing days?” And I tell them, “I simply don’t know.’”
One of the great falsehoods about Bobby’s shooting, beloved of hysterical commentators, was that he was able to ‘pick his spot’ in the goal. The truth is that all he tried to do was hit the ball on target and hope that, occasionally, one of his shots might be wide of the keeper. Again, it was Jimmy Murphy who was responsible for this approach. ‘I was given a lovely piece of advice by Jimmy. He said, “The goals don’t move. You know the general direction they are in and so, if you get the space, just smack the ball towards them.” The principle was sound. I just concentrated on making the proper contact and then hoped that the ball would scream into the net. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t.’
As well as working on his technique, Jimmy Murphy also tried to educate Bobby out of some of his more immature behaviour on the field. John Docherty recalls, ‘Bobby had this habit of indulging in gestures, or shouting at himself, if he had hit a bad ball or was disappointed with his play. Jimmy would say to him: “What’s all this arm waving? We know you hit a crap ball. Now just get on with the game.” And Jimmy told me, “That’s the schoolboy coming out. He throws a tantrum because he doesn’t want people to think that he can’t do better. As soon as we can get rid of that, we’ve got a chance with him.’”
For all Jimmy Murphy’s tutelage, it should not be thought that Manchester United had attained perfection in its coaching. In truth, the system was disorganized and the facilities poor, particularly at the United training ground, The Cliff. Wilf McGuinness recalls: ‘Looking back, it was bloody awful. The floodlights were dreadful, you could hardly see. The training kit was the worst imaginable. It was never washed, no-one knows what disease could have spread all over the place. When you arrived you just grabbed what you could from the table. Those big woollen sweaters, and the shoes, big heavy things. Afterwards you’d get in the bath – 40 of you – it was black within two minutes. When you got out you’d have to have a cold shower to get the muck off.’ Equally disturbing were the informal practice matches organized by the players themselves on an old plot of land at Old Trafford, wedged between the back of the stadium and the railway line. These sessions were epics of almost gladiatorial savagery. Anyone who could not take a pummelling would not last long. ‘Oh, those games were rough,’ remembers Joe Carolan. ‘We would be kicking the hell out of each other. Jeff Whitefoot once got cut very badly on his head and all the trainer, Tom Curry, did was give him a towel. That’s the way it was. Bobby was as brave as anyone. He gave as good as