Tributes to Sir Bobby Charlton continue

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The players and officials at Manchester United announced yesterday that one of their veterans, Sir Bobby Charlton, is deceased. Past and present players, including the club itself, continue to drop tributes to the icon.

Raphael Varane:

‘We as players at this special club stand on the shoulders of giants every day, and Sir Bobby was the biggest of them all. His impact will live on for generations to come.’

David de Gea:

‘A legend and true pillar of Manchester United, whenever people think of the club around the world, they think of Sir Bobby Charlton.’

Gary Neville:

‘He’s Man United’s greatest representative around the world and has been for 50 to 60 years. He was one of the Busby Babes, he was part of that tragic Munich air crash, he survived it and lost a lot of his team-mates and colleagues and came through.’

‘What Sir Bobby Charlton did was a great example of how you can have a great ambassador of the club, someone who was a legend of the club who does it very well in the boardroom, represented Man United in the right way. He was the golden thread from Sir Matt Busby to Sir Alex Ferguson, two golden eras in Man United’s era, and he was the constant through both of them.’

The most remarkable thing in Sir Charlton’s career was his survival of a plane crash while he was a 20-year old playing for the club. The incident took place at an airport in Germany when the plane carrying Manchester United players descended to refuel. Charlton woke up the next day after the accident.

In their tribute to him, Manchester United wrote:

‘Having survived the trauma of the Munich Air Disaster when aged just 20, he recovered from his injuries to reach the pinnacle for both club and country. In a 17-year playing career with the Reds, he played 758 games and scored 249 goals – both of which were longstanding records until, respectively, Ryan Giggs in 2008 and Wayne Rooney in 2017 surpassed his feats.

‘Highly coveted by clubs across the country, the young Charlton, nephew of the great Newcastle United striker Jackie Milburn, joined Matt Busby’s Manchester United as a schoolboy in 1953 and turned professional with the club in October 1954.

‘After winning the FA Youth Cup in 1954, 1955 and 1956, his first-team debut came on 6 October 1956, against Charlton Athletic at Old Trafford, and the youngster made an immediate impact. He scored twice in the Reds’ 4-2 league victory, despite carrying an injury.’

While writing about the accident in his autobiography, the knight wrote, ‘In so many ways I was part of the horror, but I was also, in the strangest way, detached. It was almost as if I was disembodied, a silent, traumatised participant in a terrible dream I could neither act in, nor escape from.

‘I thought ‘Why me?’ Why am I here with nothing other than a little gash on the head and all these other friends had been killed? I felt it wasn’t fair, why should it be me?

‘It was such a momentous event, for so many young people to die just on the verge of the great success that was ahead of them, and I couldn’t understand why. We walked away. A few days later you realised the enormity of what had happened, then you started thinking about how lucky you’d been. I was so lucky.’

The man has served as a living history book about a lot of the club’s past.

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