Bobby Dazzler

Keir Radnedge pays tribute to the legendary Sir Bobby Charlton

Football was in the blood for Bobby Charlton. But that has been spoken and written about countless other footballers, great and forgotten. Charlton’s status in the pantheon of not only English but world football relates to the humanity and class which shone throughout his career, and lifetime, achievements.

The Charltons were relatives of the great Newcastle United hero of the 1950s, Jackie Milburn. They began kicking a ball in the back streets of the town of Ashington in the northeast of England where their father was a coal miner. Charlton escaped a life down the pit when he fulfilled every schoolboy’s dream, at 17, by signing professional terms for Manchester United.

Matt Busby had invested more time and determination than any other manager in seeking out the finest young talents in the country. Not only Charlton, but Duncan Edwards, Eddie Colman, David Pegg and many more had been singled out for the Old Trafford treatment: turned from boys into young footballing men under the tutelage of assistant Jimmy Murphy, and then promoted to explode into the old First Division and the European Cup.

This was the philosophy behind the Busby Babes, the team of youngsters who took the league by storm in the mid-1950s and brought a breath of optimistic fresh air into an austere post-war England. The sense of that spirit of a new generation being lost exacerbated the nation’s grief when United’s plane crashed in the Munich airport snow and ice on their way home from a European Cup quarter-final in Belgrade in February 1958.