On Friday night Manchester United announced that their former great, Denis Law, had died at the age of 84.
I’m not old enough to have seen Law play, but I do remember the admiration with which one of his old team-mates, John Giles, spoke about him in a radio studio more than 20 years ago.
It took a lot to impress Giles, but I recall him becoming animated enough to demonstrate Law’s explosive reflexes with actions, stabbing his head forward as he described Law’s determination to get to the ball first.
Later that night a friend texted a photo with the caption “The game’s gone”. It was a black and white picture of a match from the 1960s and the first detail I noticed was the pitch: thick shiny mud strewn with torn-up lumps of earth. In the left foreground, the unmistakable elegant figure of the young George Best, watching the action from a distance.
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In the centre, a wild-eyed Denis Law, walking, or maybe lurching, towards the camera with the ripped remnants of his shirt and comically overstretched collar hanging loosely around his shoulder.
Behind Law, the towering warlike Jack Charlton, fists raised in a boxing stance. Further back, the familiar sight of Billy Bremner being choked by outraged opponents. On the left of the central huddle, the referee, stood back on his heels with his hands on his hips in an attitude of timid perplexity. In the background we can see thousands of delighted faces in the crowd. Nearly everyone is wearing a tie.
This magnificent image of a vanished world comes from the 1965 FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough, which finished Leeds United 0 Manchester United 0. According to the Times: “This was a rough and tumble: tough, with the rumble of trouble from the start when Bremner sawed down R Charlton in full flight. The English player usually is the gentlest of creatures. But now he retaliated immediately in anger, wagged his finger in admonition . . .”
When Robert Charlton is angrily wagging his finger you know all bets are off and indeed, reported the Times, “from that first act the battle quickly slipped into a black mood that only matched the dark stage itself”.
Law and Nobby Stiles had both been booked by the time of the brawl that produced the famous photograph. The flare-up happened when Jack Charlton grabbed Law’s shirt to stop him going past him, tearing it almost fully off his back. Law turned round and, in his own words, “lashed out” (some suggested there may have been a headbutt involved), Charlton lashed straight back, and then everyone else piled in.
The referee gave Law a talking-to but decided not to send him off. Law played the rest of the game in the tattered shirt, United’s budget in those days apparently not stretching to spares. (The shirt was picked up in the Hillsborough laundry room by a Sheffield Wednesday youth player, whose practically-minded mother then stitched it back together, thinking she was repairing a shirt rather than defiling a relic. Despite that well-meaning intervention, the shirt was sold at auction in 2006 for £2,461).
Leeds won the replay 1-0 thanks to a Billy Bremner header that was described as follows by Eric Stanger of the Yorkshire Evening Post: “Giles floated the ball unerringly into the heart of a crowded goal area. Bremner, mind working overtime, weighed up matters more speedily and precisely than his opposite numbers. He flashed past three or four defenders and moved in on the steepling place kick. With his back to goal he twisted artfully under the ball and nudged it miraculously with his head past Pat Dunne, through a tiny chink in the defensive wall and into the top corner of the net.”
Giles’s description of the goal in his memoir The Football Man was less effusive: “We were awarded a free kick near the halfway line. I took it, striking it deep into their penalty area. Billy Bremner, in attempting to get the ball back across the goal, misheaded it and somehow beat the goalkeeper Pat Dunne”.
After the first, scoreless semi-final the press had castigated the weakness of the referee and the poor behaviour of both sides.
According to the Times: “This angry, shabby affair of naked intimidation and moments of physical violence should be held up as a permanent warning to all those who bow to mammon at the expense of ethical standards. Those who live by the sword in the end may find it to be double edged.”
Yet to today’s eyes it looks irresistibly romantic. The sheer chaotic wildness of that photograph reminds you of the live TV talkshows of that era, when mentally unbalanced celebrities would drink heavily and abuse each other in a manner which is unthinkable today. They would even sometimes have serious discussions, which has also become almost unthinkable on what remains of TV.
The Times’ reference to “mammon” is interesting. Sixty years on, we can see that it’s mammon that has gradually purged the chaos from the game, creating the smoothly optimised, homogenised sports content of today.
The explosion of money turned football clubs into corporations with hundreds or thousands of employees. Players are increasingly subject to the influence of forces that never appear on the pitch. Spontaneity is discouraged by coaches who demand strict adherence to their tactical plans. Mistakes and misbehaviour are punished by additional referees who disallow goals and award penalties and red cards from remote video bunkers.
Unpredictability is stifled by the economic structures that allow a smaller number of top teams to hoard the best players. Where once it was Law, Best and Charlton versus Giles, Bremner and Hunter, Saturday night’s Premier League gave us the battle of the set-piece coaches: Nicolas Jover versus Austin MacPhee.
Some readers may be thinking that this is starting to sound like a reactionary screed of an awfully familiar type. After all, people have been lamenting the disenchantment of the world and the domestication of the human soul for a long time. Keats accused the Enlightenment’s “cold philosophy” of trying to “unweave the rainbow” two centuries before anyone thought of attacking Pep Guardiola for ruining football.
Yet something really has been lost as all those outside forces tighten their grip on a game that once belonged to the ones who were playing it.
Footballers of Law’s era often spoke about how their careers in the game had allowed them to escape the mines or other gruelling jobs in industrial society. The pitch, above all, was a place of freedom, not only for the players but for the regimented, tie-wearing masses who came to watch them every weekend.
Few represented that spirit of freedom more gloriously than Law, one of the very best in the days when the players were the only ones who mattered.
