I remember when as a kid, I'd view all his caps , medals and england shirts in a glass case at Dudley leisure centre not really knowing whose they were.
Quote from: TRO on August 26, 2010, 07:14:50 PMI remember when as a kid, I'd view all his caps , medals and england shirts in a glass case at Dudley leisure centre not really knowing whose they were.Same here. Do they still have them on display? Is Dudley Leisure Centre still there even?
Didn't he end one of our players' careers with a filthy tackle?
Quote from: cdvillafan on August 27, 2010, 05:40:07 PMDidn't he end one of our players' careers with a filthy tackle?One of the Moss Bros, can't remember which one.
The Death of Duncan Edwardsby Arthur Hopcraft, 1968.Anyone who was in Manchester in February 1958, particularly if he lived there, as I did, will remember forever the stunning impact on the city of the air crash at Munich airport which killed eight of Manchester United's players. The shoch was followed, just as it is in particularly closely tied families after a death, by a lingering communcl desolation. No other tragedy in sport has been as brutal or as affecting as this one. It was not simply that very popular athletes had been killed and a brilliantly promising team destroyed. There was a general youthfulness about this particular Manchester United team which was new to the game. Manchester relished this fact. The old, often gloomy city had a shining exuberance to acclaim. These young players were going to take the country, and probably Europe too, by storm. To identify wit this procociousness, to watch people in other towns marvelling and conceding defeat, gave a surge to the spirit. Suddenly most of the team was dead. The players killed were Roger Byrne, Geoff Bent, Eddie Colman, Duncan Edwards, David Pegg, Mark Jones, Tommy Taylor, Bill Whelan. Four of them were England internation players, Byrne, Edwards and Taylor all firmly established with appearances in the England side well into double figures. Pegg had been capped once. It was the death of Duncan Edwards which gave the deepest, most lasting pain to the community. This was not because he was liked personally any more than the others, but because there was a special appeal to people's ideals about him. Walter Winterbottom, the England team manager at the time, called him 'the spirit of British football'. He meant the football that exists in children's day-dreams and good men's hopes: honest, brilliant, irresistibly strong. There was an extra poignancy in Edward's death in that he lived for fifteen days after the crash. How bitterly that hurt. One of the key components in Duncan Edwards's appeal was his size. Big men in sport are always specially compelling, whether they lumber comically or endear by their dogged willingness. Edwards at twenty-one was a six-footer, weighing 13.5 stone, but with the immense presence he brought to his game he had nimbleness as well as strength, flar as well as calm. A youth so equipped was bound to prompt affectionate epithets from sportswriters and fans, and people cudgelled their brains to find new ones. He was Kid Dynamite, the Baby Giant, the Gentle Giant, Big Dunk, the Boy with the Heart of a Man. As the daily reports came in from the hospital in Munich, Manchester raised hope for his survival. In the second week of the crash people began to talk in their ready sentimental cliches about the Lionheart fighting his way through again. There was much banality in the words, but the longing was sincere. Then he died. Edwards was born in October 1936, in Dudley, Worcestershire. As a schoolboy of the forties and a teenager of the fifties he was part of the generation which linked the hard, sombre days of the war and rationing with the more dashing, mobile times which followed in such animated reaction. He would be in his early thirties now and, if still playing football, which is likely, assuredly an old-fashioned-looking figure among the imitating contemporaries of George Best. He had dignity on the field always, even in his teens: that senior officer kind of authority which comes to few players and then late in career, as with Danny Blanchflower, Jimmy Armfield, George Cohen. I looked through an album of photographs in Edwards's parents' home, which showed him right through his life. The face was grave, the gaze he gave at the world open and tranquil. Winterbottom's description was not fanciful, in spite of being one which any thoughtful man would hesitate to use in connection with any player. Edwards represented the kind of self-respecting modesty whis is not nurtured in the ferocity of the modern game. It has not been deliberately forced out of football; it is just not natural to the age. The album had pictures of Edwards in his street clothes, as well as in football strips, and in them the period was caught, fixed by his personality. He was bulky in those ill-fitting jackets and wide trousers with broad turn-ups. Clothes did not interest young footballers then; there was neither enough money nor a teenage-identity industry to exploit such an interest. He could have been a young miner freshly scrubbed for a night at a Labour Club dance. He did not look important, in the celebrated sense; he looked as if he mattered, and belonged, to his family and his friends. The anonymity of style was true to his generation and his kind. The situation was very different when he put his football boots on. I went to see Mr Geoff Groves, the headmaster of a secondary school in Dudly, who was one of Edwards's teachers when the boy was at primary school. Mr Groves remembered this eleven-year-old playing for the school against a neighbouring school the day after Edwards got home from a spell of ho-picking. He said: 'He dominated the whole match. He told all the other twenty-one players what to do, and the referee and both the linesmen. When I got home that evening I wrote to a friend and said I'd just seen a boy of eleven who would play for England one day.' A year later, Mr Groves said, the boy was playing 'in the style of a man, with wonderful balance and colossal power in his shot'. Already he was showing the intelligence in his game which became central to all he did. 'He already understood all about distribution of the ball,' said Mr Groves. 'And he was such a dominating player that the ball seemed to come to him wherever he was.' It is one of the distinguishing marks of the most talented players that they always seem to have the ball exactly when they want it. Edwards was a heroic figure in Dudley long before he became a professional player. He became captain of the England schoolboys' side, having joined it when he was thirteen, and many of the leading clubs were clamouring for his signature. Matt Busby called at his home at 2 a.m. on the morning after his sixteenth birthday and acquired him for United. He was sixteen-and-a-half when he played his first match for United, 6 feet tall and weighing 12 stone 6 lb. At eighteen-and-a-half he became the youngest player ever to be picked for the full England international side. It was the one which beat Scotland 7-2 at Wembley in April 1955, and this was the company he was in: Williams (Wolves); Meadows (Man City); Byrne (United); Phillips (Portsmouth); Wright (Wolves, captain); Edwards; Matthews (Blackpool); Revie (Man City); Lofthouse (Bolton); Wilshaw (Wolves); Blunstone (Chelsea). Sir Stanley Matthews who was forty when he played in that match, told me that he thought Edwards could truly be called unique. To Matthews, who learned his football in the days when, as he put it, 'they all said you had to be strong, with big, thick thighs,' Edwards's build was no surprise. 'But', he said, 'he was so quick, and that was what made the difference. I can't remember any other player that size who was quick like that.' The point was emphasised eighteen months later, when Edwards, normally a left-half, was placed at inside-left in the England team against Denmark, when the forward line was Matthews, Brooks (Spurs), Taylor, Edwards, Finney (Preston North End). Edwards scored twice and Taylor three times which gives an indication of the scoring power Manchester United had at their command. The fondness Manchester United's supporters felt for this player was expressed in the common adulation by boys but also in the quiet admiration of the kind which fathers show for successful sons when they speak about them to neighbours, and out of the boys' hearing. In this regard for Edwards there was often a sad sympathy for opposing players who were being crushed coldly out of the game by him. I remember watching one of United's home matches when beside me was a spectator in his fifties, who shouted little but nodded his head nearly all the time in deep satisfaction, letting out occasionally an equally deep sigh which was eloquent in its pleasure. By the middle of the first half one of the opposition's inside forwards was reacting furiously to the frustration of being treated like a small child by Edwards, firmly but without viciousness or even very much concern. The player threw himself several times at Edwards, eithing missing the moving body entirely or bouncing off it, and on each occasion the man beside me sucked in his breath, shook his head and said softly: 'Nay, lad, not with'im, not with 'im.' It was the decent, absorbed football fan like this one for whom Winterbottom was speaking when he called Edwards the spirit of British football. Edwards's funeral took place at St Francis's Church, Dudley, not far from his home. There were at least 5,000 people outside the church. The vicar made it a footballer's service. He said: 'He goes to join the memorable company of Steve Bloomer and Alex James.' Had he lived long enough Edwards would surely have joined the company of England team captains. Instead he left a memory of brilliance and courage and a sense of vast promise he was not allowed to fulfil. His grave in Dudley cemetary is elaborate. The headstone has an ingrained picture of him in footballing kit holding a ball above his head for a throw-in. An inscription reads: 'A Day of Memory, sad to recall. Without Farewell, He Left Us All.' There are three flower stands, and one of them is in the shape of a football. It suits the nature of his class and his neighbourhood, and it is attended with great care by his father, a gardener at the cemetery. His father, Mr. Gladstone Edwards, felt he had to explain why he was working at the cemetery. He said: 'People think I came to this job because he's there. But that wasn't the reason. I had to change my work, and I've always liked flowers and gardening. I felt I wanted to be out of doors.' Duncan was his only child. Neither he nor his wife could hide the depth of their loss. Nor was there any reason why they should try. When I went to see them Duncan had been dead for nine years, and Mr Edwards, at least, could talk about his son straightforwardly, although all the time with a quiet deliberation. He said that even then there was still a steady trickle of visitors to Duncan's grave. There were days when twenty people would arrive to look at it, like pilgrims. They seldom knew the gardener they stopped to talk to was the player's father. They nearly always said the same thing: that there would never be another Duncan. Mr Edwards added that Friday often brought the most visitors, and they were often lorry-drivers with Manchester accents. They had stopped on their long run home from somewhere south. The next day, of course, they would be at Old Trafford to watch the match. In Mr and Mrs Edward's small semi-detached house the front room is kept shaded and spotless. It was in here that Mr Edwards showed me Duncan's photograph album, and also let me open a glass-fronted display cabinet and examine the mementoes of Duncan's life. It contained eighteen of his caps at full international, youth and schoolboy level, to represent the eighteen times that he played in his country's senior team. Each was kept brushed and was filled with tissue paper. On top of the cabinet were three framed photographs of Duncan: one taken in uniform when he was in the Army, doing his National Service, another with his fiancee and a third in which he wears a Manchester United shirt. Beside them was a framed five pound note, which was the last present he gave his mother. The tiny room was deominated by a portrait of Edwards in his England shirt, the frame two feet wide by two-and-a-half feet long. The room was a shrine. That showcase also had a copy of the order of service which was used on the day that two stained-glass windows were dedicated to Edwards at St Francis's Church. They are close to the font, beside a picture of a gentle Jesus which was given to the church by a mother, in memory of a baby girl. One of the windows has Edwards down on one knee and there is a scroll running across his chest which says: 'God is with us for our Captain.' All the survivors of the Munich crash were in the church when the windows were dedicated by the Bishop of Worcester in August 1961. Busby said at the service: 'These windows should keep the name of Duncan Edwards alive for ever, and shine as a monument and example to the youth of Dudley and England.' Edwards name is also kept in front of the people of Dudley in the title of the Duncan Edwards Social Club, which is attached to the town football club, and in two trophies for local schools football. The memorials commemorate not only Duncan Edwards's football but also the simple decency of the man. He represented thousands in their wish for courage, acclaim and rare talent, and he had all three without swagger. The hero is the creature other people would like to be. Edwards was such a man, and he enabled people to respect themselves more. From 'The Football Man' - 1968
Wednesday, February 06, 2008Terry Venables on Duncan Edwards BY THE time I was 15, it looked like I was going to be a good footballer. I was a big lad for my age, and the newspapers were calling me the new Duncan Edwards, the young hero at Manchester United. I was so flattered that I have kept those cuttings to this day. In the restaurant at my club, Scribes West, there is an oil painting of Edwards. He was my hero and an inspiration. When I was growing up, there was no televised football to speak of, and if you wanted to see a particular player or team, it meant going to one of their matches. It was February 1958 and United had just caused a stir by beating Bolton 7-2, and everyone was talking about Duncan Edwards. So I persuaded my dad, Fred, to come with me to Highbury to see United play Arsenal. It was an unusual trip for two committed Spurs fans, and a day I will never forget. United won a smashing match 5-4, but what happened afterwards gave the occasion a dreadful poignancy that still lingers. Just four days later, the Busby Babes were decimated by the Munich air crash. Along with everyone else, I was devastated. So many died so young - my hero among them. It was a terrible tragedy, too awful to dwell on. I prefer to remember that lovely day out with my dad, standing behind the goal at the old Clock end at Highbury. It took Duncan Edwards less than 10 minutes to show us what all the fuss was about. I remember I was a bit disappointed that United weren't at full strength. With the European Cup tie against Red Star Belgrade only four days away, Matt Busby rested his centre-half, Jackie Blanchflower, the two wingers, David Pegg and Johnny Berry, and the clever, creative inside-forward, Liam Whelan. Mind you, it was still a hell of a team, with a forward line that included Bobby Charlton, Tommy Taylor and Dennis Viollet, supported from half-back by Eddie Colman and the man I couldn't take my eyes off, Duncan Edwards. Jack Kelsey, a legend at Highbury, was in goal for Arsenal but, good as he was, he was beaten all the way when Duncan opened the scoring with a cracking shot. That was my moment. We had travelled in to see him and, with the latecomers still arriving, he had me turning to my dad with a "Did you see that" look. Edwards had taken a pass from Viollet and strode forward like an unstoppable giant before shooting past Kelsey from 25 yards. There were eight more goals in a fantastic match, but Duncan's, and his overall performance, are all I really remember. Afterwards, I just couldn't get it out of my head how good United were. Duncan was marvellous. Everything he did comes back to me as if it was yesterday. Such strength, such poise. We are talking about a long time ago - nearly 40 years - but I can still see him, and that tremendous power of his, even now. He was only 21, but already he had played for England 18 times, and there were far fewer internationals played in those days. I was always Tottenham through and through, and it was not so much the Busby Babes as the Spurs Double side that gave me a feeling for how I wanted to play the game, but I stood there that day thinking Edwards was a wonderful player, and that I wanted to play like him. United were the best around at the time, and he was their star man. I had heard tales of this real-life Roy of the Rovers a few years before. People at Chelsea spoke of a Youth Cup tie against United. Chelsea had an outstanding team that day, Jimmy Greaves and Peter Brabrook included, but the story goes that a storm broke during the game. Edwards scored two goals playing at centre-forward, then when United turned round at half-time, and had the storm against them, they played him at centre-half, and he won everything. He was blessed with an all-round ability no one had ever seen before. This was a guy who played for England at 18, unheard of in those days. Physically, he was an impressive specimen, with legs like tree trunks, which gave him unmistakable power. He usually played at left-half, but centre-half or centre-forward was no problem for him because he had everything. He was a great tackler, he was a good passer, he scored goals and he was a rock in defence. He was left-footed, but he could use the right, too. It was exciting to look at him and think how good he was going to be, and for him to be cut down like that was too tragic for words. No one can know what he might have achieved had he lived and gone on. It is a great disappointment to me, not knowing what he might have become. He was potentially the greatest player I've seen. Duncan played in the same position as Bobby Moore, and we'll never know what might have happened in 1966 if he had still been around. He would have been only 29. Perhaps Bobby would have got in the team in another position, because he was a great player, too, but you would never have picked Moore in front of Edwards. Duncan had the edge everywhere, with his remarkable power, pace and strength in the air. Quite simply, Duncan Edwards had the lot.
How odd. I was at my uncle's funeral today. He used to play in the same Brierley Hill School Boys team as Duncan.
The one thing that saddened me as much as anything yesterday about this, was when I arrived home and told Mrs Tro (Dudley boro resident and age 36)where I had been and she replied "who ?".I really mean we the residents of Dudley borough and surrounding locality, should have been educated about Duncan at school age by schools.Apparently there is a teacher at Howley Grange primary in Halesowen who too shares this belief and has made sure the young uns there knew who Duncan Edwards was, by means of a special lesson. This should be compulsary schooling round here. We're quick enough teaching little Christians about Buddha and the likes !
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Topic: ?% Villa - Duncan Edwards (Read 13893 times)
