The day when time ran out for Busby Babes

February 6, 1958, just gone 3 p.m.

A clock bearing that time bolted to an Old Trafford wall in memory of a darker time, 54 years ago, when a team and a dream died, is still standing.

I had just turned 20 and I remember vividly how the news of that disaster travelled worldwide even though we did not have the modern technology of communication.

To those my age and a decade younger the very word Munich is enough to conjure the starkest of images – of bodies in a snow-bound runway, the flower of English football crushed and broken on a desolate airfield many miles from home; of Matt Busby, whom I had the honour and privilege to meet years later, and who at the time was neither a knight nor a legend, lying barely alive and unaware of the wordwide prayers being offered daily for his recovery. He revealed in his 1973 autobiography that as he clung to life, “I wanted to die because my tortured mind kept saying: was I to blame? I should not have allowed the pilot to make that third attempt at take-off, when it clipped a house and broke up in flames and confusion”.

Of Duncan Edwards the boy-man – a second Pele in the making – at just 21 years, one of the 23 victims of doomed flight 609ZU.

A new generation of football fans has grown up knowing that awful date and what it means to Manchester United.

The crash claimed the lives of eight of the Busby Babes – Roger Byrne, Geoffrey Bent, Eddie Coleman, Duncan Edwards, Mark Jones, Tommy Taylor, David Pegg and Liam Whelan. Though Busby who had created one great team after another, always maintained: “They were all great teams. But I have no doubt in my mind at all, the pre-Munich team was potentially the best club side I have seen”.

The party of players, officials and journalists were on their way home from Belgrade, where United had drawn 3-3 with Red Star Belgrade to qualify for the European Cup semi-finals. It should have been a time of celebration!

“England wept. No, the world wept” Busby was to write later.

It was during their darkest hour, that United ceased to be merely a football club. After Munich, they became a much-loved institution that transcended the normal rules of support.

Perversely, Manchester United have grown to be the team that most fans of other clubs love to hate.