Burn - Best and Edwards

The worlds champion worrier. It is a face on which worry more accurately worritability, the under-colour of worry seems to have been permanently imprinted. It looks like a face incapable of lighting up with joy; a face from which joy, or even the open and unselfconscious expression of pleasure, has been forever extinguished.

Even when England won the World Cup in 1966, bringing to a climax a summer month brimming over with a very un-English sense of carnival and expansiveness, Bobby Charlton brought a mask of tears to show the presentation party at the Royal Box. His first question to his brother Jack, on the pitch sharing the victory with him, had been a ball-aching, worritable one: What is there to win now?

Less than a month later, hailed, alongside Jack, as a returning hero in his home town of Ashington, Bobby arrived late and then spent the processional half-mile from the colliery terrace where he had grown up to the Town Hall looking, according to contemporary observers, anxious and on edge. While Jack perched on the back of the rear seat of the open car, taking the cheers of the crowd, waving to familiar faces from his childhood that he recognized, sending up the fact that he was riding past them as a winner in a Roller, Bobby remained seated and sombre. Even his mother, the ever-exuberant Cissie Charlton, remarked afterwards that their Bobby had looked peaky and distinctly uncomfortable.

Although in north-east legend he is always fused in an unusually close relationship with his mother, a daughter of the goalkeeper Tanner Milburn and cousin of the great Jackie and a long line of footballing Milburns, Bobby actually took after his father temperamentally. Bob senior liked his pigeons and his allotment and his own slow company and, typically, had worked his usual shift at the Linton pit in Ashington instead of watching Bobby play what everybody said was the match of his life in the semi-final of the World Cup against Portugal. He felt well shot of the hoo-ha and the blether.

In 1968, ten years after Munich, when Manchester United finally won the European Cup by beating Benfica of Lisbon at Wembley, Bobby was a no-show at the after-match party. Crowds in their thousands milled around the Russell Hotel in Kings Cross that night; the celebrations inside went on until dawn. George Best, who scored the first of Uniteds winning goals in extra time (Charlton got the killer goal, the third after the restart), would later claim to have no memory of anything that happened after the team left Wembley; as was to be the case so often in the coming years, recall was obliterated by the alcohol. I dont remember going to the official dinner, Best later said, though Im told I was there.

Also invited as guests of the club were the families of the players who died at Munich. But, when it came to it, Bobby, perhaps not surprisingly, couldnt face them. He sent his wife Norma down to apologize for his absence. It has all been a bit too much for Bobby, she explained. He is just too tired physically and emotionally to face up to all this. He couldnt take it, with complete strangers coming up and slapping him on the back and telling him what a wonderful night it is Hes remembering the lads who cant be here tonight.

Once in his room, Charlton had felt faint. He was drained. It had been eleven years since Matt Busby flying in the face of official and unofficial opposition from the English football authorities, who still, at mid-century, regarded continental teams as wogs and dagoes (to quote League Secretary, Alan Hardaker) had embarked on his renegade European adventure . Eight of Charltons fastest friends, among them Eddie Colman, Duncan Edwards and Billy Whelan, had met their deaths at Munich. The average age of the players who died in the disaster was twenty-one. Now he had eventually arrived at the destination they had set out for together. Soon, in recognition of the Lazarus act he had performed both professionally and personally, heroically hauling himself back from the appalling injuries he sustained in the crash, the Boss would be honoured with a knighthood.

Every time Charlton tried to ease himself off the bed in the room overlooking the heaving crowd and Russell Square, his legs buckled. The surge sensation, the leap of people already standing, that bolt of noise and joy when the ball went in. He felt old prematurely, with feeble limbs and double vision and dizzy spells. Every time he tried to make it to the bedroom door, he fainted. When he swung his legs off the bed, his legs couldnt take the weight of him. And tomorrow would bring only more of the same: the consuming guilt of being a survivor when his friends had perished; the trial of carrying the Cup home in glory to Old Trafford, parading it in convoy past the waving and cheering, screaming-themselves-hoarse Red thousands of the fanatic faithful; glad-handing the silverware, holding the big, bowl-sided trophy up to collect their reflection when, if any of them were doing it, it really should have been Duncan.

We passed them / All poised irresolutely, watching us go / As if out on the end of an event / Waving goodbye / To something that survived it. Philip Larkins lines from The Whitsun Weddings, written in 1958, the year of Munich, contain all the melancholy which, in the ensuing half-century, the crestfallen, dutiful figure of Bobby Charlton would come to embody.

So synonymous has he become with sobriety and black-braided ceremonial the scrubbed-up, bow-headed figure in the unexceptional suit acting as a representative of his club, his sport or his country, not infrequently appearing to be teetering on the edge of one of his dizzy spells that the other Bobby Charlton, the player that many who saw him play at his peak in the sixties thought comprised the athletic ideal, quick and full of intelligence, his massive goal-scoring power erupting on the run suddenly, out of an inborn, flowing elegance He used to delight people, his old grammar-school headmaster once said