Did you know Duncan Edwards, Dad?
Did you know Duncan Edwards, Dad, I mean really really know?
It’s just you’ve kept so many cuttings from all those years ago.
And were the babes the greatest, the greatest ever team?
Or just enshrined here in this history, just a bygone boyhood dream.
Now I know you idolised them, Dad, you gave each one their own page,
the pictures are well faded now, but I suppose that comes with age.
Dad, did Tommy Taylor really head a ball against the bar,
which Harry Gregg collected, it had rebounded back so far?
And was Duncan Edwards really, the greatest of them all,
with silken skills and feathery touch, thirteen stone and six foot tall?
Now there’s a contradiction surely Dad, but I’m going to let it pass,
but Billy Whelan must have played once, without first going to Mass.
And was Harry Gregg a goalkeeper supreme?
Were Eddie Coleman’s hazy runs like red blurs on swards of green?
And Dad can you explain to me how it ever came to pass,
that Roger Byrne, just five foot nine, covered every blade of glass?
Or how David Pegg whose swerving runs, like a scorpion you said,
always struck the ball with venom, yet left no one for dead?
Or how it was that big Mark Jones could soar into the sky,
yet still patrol his area, so that nobody got by?
Then there’s the team of Sixty Eight, and Dad I’d like to know,
how George Best was always missing, yet played five hundred games or so?
And how was it Bobby Charlton, who played so many vital roles,
could be both a great goalscorer and a scorer of great goals?
Or how Denis Law had chipped a ball from forty yards or more,
it came back off the crossbar, and yet Law was there to score?
What use was it that Pat Crerand could split defences with one pass,
when the ball only ever landed on a sixpence on the grass?
And was Stepney’s save at Wembley, the best you’ve ever seen,
or was it just that it resulted in the fulfilment of a dream?
So now to Matt Busby, or Sir Matt as he’s now known,
from a mining town in Scotland, yet still one of our own?
Then finally there’s the Munich clock, the disaster time still shown.
why do people say that they never intended coming home?
The boy looked up with pleading eyes, and his father gently said.
There’s a lifetime of old memories in the scrapbook you’ve just read.
And of course there is some fiction, most fact, some strange yet true,
that’s what makes players into legends, now I’ve passed them on to you.
Those pictures may be faded son, but I can see them all so clear,
as if it were just yesterday, and I hold each memory dear.
Now I’ve passed this scrapbook on to you, to treasure for all time,
And you too will find your heroes and build to them a shrine,
and you’ll add your bits of fiction, but don’t worry son that’s fine,
to make legends of your heroes and then place them alongside mine.
And you’ll understand in years to come, as you watch great United teams,
why it is we call Old Trafford, The Theatre of Dreams.
