The cover image selected for writer David Peace’s re-telling of the Munich Disaster depicts Bobby Charlton in cardigan, tie and smart trousers, dribbling a football up a terraced backstreet in his home village of Ashington, Northumberland, as three spellbound boys look on.
He had returned there to come to terms with the death of so many friends in the crash and there was clamour for interviews. Appearing for the photograph was as much as he could possibly bear.
The book’s early pages capture the apocalyptic vision which confronted him when he first opened his eyes amid the slush of Munich-Reim Airport’s runway; a vision which would still have been raw as he kicked that brown ball down Ashington’s Beatrice Street.
There was the sky, the flakes of snow falling on him, the flames flickering under the fuselage of the plane, 40 yards away. And, as he cast his eyes around, the body of a teammate he knew was dead. The man who became Sir Bobby Charlton would never name that player. He went to the grave with the memory.
Yet the sorrows of 1958 extended so much further than this. The book – which synthesises a vast amount of pre-existing material on the disaster into a single, part-imagined text – is a devastating depiction of the quotidian, ordinary details of tragedy and loss.
Tragedy chanters should read David Peace’s re-telling of the Munich Disaster, with the cover showing Bobby Charlton playing football with children in his home village
Nobby Stiles had to clean the players’ boots from the container shipped back from Munich
Nobby Stiles, a United trainee, being asked to unpack and clean the players’ boots from the kit container they called ‘the skip’, when it was shipped back from Munich. ‘Sorting out the boots of the living from the boots of the dead, to start to brush and dust.’ The relentless rain through which the big, black, old cars of funeral cortege after funeral cortege picked their way.
Nobby Lawton, another United trainee, missing teammate Eddie Colman’s funeral because his employer, a coal merchant, would only release him for one a day. June Jones, wife of Mark Jones, the centre half who died, advertising for buyers of the many budgies and canaries he’d kept in an aviary he built out the back of his house, on Manchester’s Kings Road.
Those who were lost had lived ordinary lives. Jones had been dreaming of running a pet shop with June as they grew old together. Tommy Taylor, a wonderful centre forward, had been reading Teach Yourself Public Speaking and Teach Yourself Maths to better himself. His heartbroken parents found the little black and yellow editions on his bedside table when they went to his digs – 22 Great Stone Road – to collect his things.
The myriad sorrows were universal and echoing through these pages are reminders of what so many lived with in the shadow of the Hillsborough Disaster, 31 years later.
Kenny Dalglish attended four funerals in one day following the Hillsborough disaster
Liverpool knew all about cortege after cortege, of course. Kenny Dalglish attended four funerals in one day. The guilt of those left behind was something the two cities shared, too. And there was same sense in both places of ordinary lives – full of promise, struggle, optimism – cut short.
Arthur Horrocks was one of those who, in his own way, had sought to better himself. No self-help books, perhaps, but he’d swapped a life working on the Liverpool Corporation buses for a career selling insurance and pensions for the Prudential, and had started to flourish. He packed up his yellow Triumph Toledo and set off for Hillsborough, leaving behind a wife and two sons, aged eight and six. They never saw him again.
The parallels extend to wrongful blame. Though Liverpool’s treatment by South Yorkshire Police and others is incomparable, the British European Airways pilot Jim Thain, made a scapegoat by German investigators and his own employers, also bore an enormous weight of injustice. Peace writes: ‘Jim Thain was the most hated man in England, a man most people seemed to wish was dead, wished his family dead, too, so he might know how it felt.’ Only in 1969 was the pilot exonerated.
Manchester’s grief is Liverpool’s grief, Liverpool’s is Manchester’s, and there is no nuance in Peace’s wish that the two find a communion in mutual loss and expunge the disgusting mutual taunting for which we now have the term, ‘tragedy chanting.’
The title of his book is ‘Munichs’, that hateful term aimed at United supporters by an abusive minority of Liverpool, Leeds and Manchester City fans: a word, Peace says in an author’s note at the end of the book, that he wishes to reclaim.
‘This, along with similarly abusive references to Heysel and Hillsborough, directed at supporters of Liverpool, is one of the things that sickens me most about modern football,’ he writes. ‘One of my intentions in calling the novel “Munichs” is to confront this head-on.’
‘Munichs’ has such a vile connotation that, for me, it should be consigned to oblivion, not plastered across the cover of a book. But the words within the covers are something quite exceptional. If some of the ‘tragedy-chanters’ could find it within themselves to pick it up, read and reflect on it, they might think again before next disseminating their poison.
Why didn’t Carsley just tell the truth?
There’s a rich tradition of people in authority making idiots of themselves when it comes to national anthems. I was working in North Wales in 1993 when the then Welsh Secretary John Redwood mimed – in the very loosest sense of the word – the Welsh national anthem. Unforgettable. It’s still out there on YouTube.
But give me Redwood’s absurdity over po-faced Lee Carsley’s ridiculous claim that he refuses to sing God Save the King because he is ‘always really focused on my first actions of the game.’ The choreographed closing of his eyes at the appointed moment on Saturday was presumably designed to contribute to the nonsense that anthem time is an opportunity for mindfulness.
Lee Carsley should have given the real reason why he didn’t want to sing the national anthem
I happen to subscribe to the view that the England manager must have the spine to sing the anthem, given that most of us would all rather be hoping the players might join in, as a source of team motivation. I’ll never forget Gary Speed issuing his Wales players with copies of Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau in his tragically short time at the helm and asking them to learn the words. Awe-inspiring.
But empathy for Carsley would have been a little easier to find if he could have found it within himself to admit that, as a former Ireland international, he simply finds singing the English anthem a bit awkward. Carsley as permanent manager? No thanks.
England show complacency against Sri Lanka
England lose by eight wickets to Sri Lanka in a performance reeking of complacency and Joe Root declares that ‘even Coldplay aren’t going to be No 1 every week.’ Excuse me?
The observation was actually rather apt given that Coldplay last topped the singles chart in 2011 and the album chart in 2021 – and England are currently sixth in the Test Championship.
This entire Test summer has been an exercise in Ashes preparation, whilst punters fork out £100 for the privilege. ‘We’re always looking at finding ways of winning,’ a needled Root declared, as if to say that England were actually world beaters. Coach Brendan McCullum didn’t even turn up to answer for a shambolic display. The whole show reeked of hubris.
