The Sports Factor

In the UK this week the football world is focussed on one of Britain's most sacred sporting memories: the 1958 aeroplane crash that decimated Manchester United football club. Amid the tears and testimonials lies bitterness at the way some of the survivors were treated.

Please note that due to copyright restrictions parts of this program have been removed.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Mick O'Regan: Hello everyone, and welcome to the program, where this week I'm interested in the power of sport, and particularly sporting memories, to shift the mood of a nation.

Now for football fans in Australia it's obviously been a week of delight.

Gerard Whateley: Eyes to the referee, the whistle can't be far away now. There it is! Australia has surely sent a trimmer through the group of death. Their path to South Africa in 2010 begins in emphatic and impressive style. Australia 3; Qatar, nil.

Mick O'Regan: The ABC's Gerard Whateley, summing up Wednesday night's big game in Melbourne.

The Socceroos have taken a first, important step on what will hopefully be a path leading all the way to the next World Cup finals, and we'll come to that in just a moment.

And later in the show, we'll hear about a far more serious side of football as we head to England to discuss the 50th anniversary of one of football's darkest moments.

[Excerpt of BBC News Report]

Newsreader: Here is the News.

So far we know there are 23 survivors after Manchester United's air crash at Munich this afternoon. The aircraft is a twin-engined Elizabethan on charter from BEA. It was returning from Belgrade, where Manchester United had entered the semi-final of the European Cup. It had reached Munich, and was just taking off for home in poor weather when the crash came at 3 o'clock. It plunged from about 60 feet, bursting into flames near houses.

Mick O'Regan: The sombre tones of the BBC News 50 years ago, informing listeners of a disaster that resonated way beyond sport.

The continuing significance of the Munich air disaster points to the truly character of the round ball game.

And since the 2006 World Cup finals, Australians have had a real understanding of the game's global reach, and obviously the victory over Qatar this week reinforced it.

But tonight, the local A-league finals continue with a crunch game between the Queensland Roar and Sydney Football Club. The winner will go on to the preliminary final, and the loser will go home.

Frank Farina is the Queensland coach, and I caught up with him after the team's final training run.

Frank Farina first of all, welcome to The Sports Factor on ABC Radio National.

Frank Farina: Thank you.

Mick O'Regan: Wednesday night's game, Australia and Qatar, just as a former Socceroo coach, what was your assessment of the team in that first run under Pim Verbeek?

Frank Farina: I thought they were exceptional, played very well, particularly first half, to go 3-nil up, and at times it looked like it was men against boys. So I thought it was a very solid Australian performance, and from my perspective very pleased Craig Moore got through it without any problems.

Mick O'Regan: Indeed, because he's the Captain of the Queensland Roar. Just on Pim Verbeek, the Dutch coach that's taken over from Guus Hiddink, is there a sort of continuity now between the styles of play that the Socceroos are playing?

Frank Farina: Yes, most probably you could say that. But again, like Pim played with the 4-4-2 formation, which Hiddink didn't play much with, but I think the style of the coaching has been continued, if you like. Coaches will change the set-ups, players and ways that you play. I think consistency's there, that they're both Dutchmen.

Mick O'Regan: Now much has been made of the fact that Verbeek brought in the European-based players, the experienced players that were in the 2006 campaign. Is there a risk, Frank, that there's going to be a different style of play at the national level as to what we see in the A-league?

Frank Farina: No, not at all, again as I said, they played with a 4-4-2 formation Wednesday night, so a lot of players are familiar with that, playing in Europe, but also here in Australia in the A-league, a number of teams play in that manner, so no, there's no danger of that, it's just a matter of the manager or the coach deciding which way he wants to go.

Mick O'Regan: Now talking of the A-league, tonight the Queensland Roar will host Sydney FC in the second leg of the semi-final. The loser will bow out of the A-league for this season. This is obviously for your players, their last home game of '07-'08. How are you preparing them? What do you say to them before a game like this?

Frank Farina: Oh look, it's been pretty easy, the lead-up to the week has been great, it's been very lax, we've had solid training sessions which have been good. But you don't need to say too much, you know. We've got a really good mix of experienced players who do help as well, in terms of talking to the younger ones, but they all realise the importance of the game tonight, and you don't need to say a lot. These are the sorts of games players live to play for, and it's a wonderful opportunity for them and I'm sure they'll stand up.

Mick O'Regan: Well what has been said, there's been a bit of sort of antagonistic verbal sparring between you and John Kosmina the Sydney FC coach. What do you make of that? When John Kosmina comes out and says that the Queenslanders are whingers and that you're a whinger, is that just part of the sort of pschy-ops before the game?

Frank Farina: Oh yes, I think that's what he said half tongue-in-cheek, and it's a bit of a gee-up and a wind-up, but I've known Kossy for many years, you know we played together at club and international level, so I didn't look too much into it. I actually spoke to him yesterday. No, but he's going all right, but those things happen, and we'll all say things which will get a bit of attention from people, but Kossy's Kossy.

Mick O'Regan: I don't want to delve into your private conversations, but when you spoke to him was it a full and frank exchange of views?

Frank Farina: Ah no, we're good mates, you know, and we have a bit of a laugh; he calls me names, I'll call him names, and we get on with it, but at the end of the day, tonight the two teams go head-to-head, and the best team on the night's going to win.

Mick O'Regan: Now Sydney in the first leg played a very physical game, it was a nil-all draw in Sydney. They played a very physical game which drew your ire to some extent, particularly on one of your smaller players. Is that physicality going to weigh in on Sydney's favour?

Frank Farina: No, I don't think so. I think the younger players are up to it, they wouldn't be playing at this level if they weren't. I just found it pretty ironic that the first 7 or 8 fouls were made by Sydney, and Queensland picked up the first yellow card in both games that we've played in the last three or four weeks. That's what I was alluding to in saying there's a lot of fouls which were given to us but went unpunished, and then we had two of our players that made fouls and got given a direct yellow card. So that was really the gist of what I was saying. But no, I don't think tonight's game, the physical factor is going to benefit of be advantageous to Sydney. I think what it's going to be is exactly what I said, that the best team that steps up on the night will win.

Mick O'Regan: Now 50,000 people were in Melbourne on Wednesday night to watch Australia beat Qatar 3:nil. What do you think that says about where the A-league is placed now? It's really moving to the centre of the mainstream as far as a major sport is concerned, would you agree?

Frank Farina: It certainly has, and if we can maintain that momentum for at least another two to three years, I think we can say we've really made it. But at this stage, everything's going really well. Melbourne are getting big crowds, I think they averaged something like 35,000 this year, we've averaged 17,000, 18,000. It's alive and well, the national team getting 50,000 on Wednesday night, so I think the A-league is very successful at the moment, and is promising what I think we've all been hoping for the last 30 or 40 years, to be awakened, and it's slowly coming out of its slumber.

Mick O'Regan: Just a final question, and forgive me if this is not something that's crossed your radar, but the next story on our show today is going to be looking at the 50th anniversary of the Munich air disaster in 1958 when Matt Busby's Manchester United team was decimated in that crash. Things like that, as someone who's followed international soccer and football as long as you have, does that resonate with you all this distance from England? Is that an internationally significant memorial?

Frank Farina: Oh, for sure. And apart from the fact Manchester United's my team, I've got books on the Munich air disaster, and you read about famous players - Duncan Edwards who at 22 passed away and he'd already played 20 times for England or something. So it certainly does, I mean it was a very, very tragic event which happened which decimated a team, which was arguably going to be the best in Europe, and we've seen other teams such as Torino in Italy when the air crash happened there as well; it affected not only the clubs, like for Manchester United the Munich air disaster, but it affected a lot of football followers around the world, because when you talk about a club of that magnitude and stature in world football, an event like that certainly was felt around the world.

Mick O'Regan: The coach of the Queensland Roar football club, and former national coach, Frank Farina, speaking after a training session in Brisbane.

In the first week of February, 1958, in the German city of Munich, a terrible air disaster decimated the young Manchester United football club and plunged the sporting world into grief.

Busby's Babes, the extraordinarily young and prodigiously gifted side who rose to prominence under the tutelage of their famous manager, Matt Busby, were on a plane which crashed during take-off on a snow-covered airstrip.

Of the 23 people killed, five were journalists and 8 were members of the team, taking with them the heart and soul of English football.

As you'd imagine the story of Munich '58 has been told a number of times, but a recent book by sports journalist Jeff Connor, has drawn long overdue attention to the survivors, and the way they were treated.

Jeff spoke to me from his home in Cumbria in north-west England, and I began by asking him to describe the social impact of the disaster.

Jeff Connor: To put it in the context of the time, it may be hard for your listeners to work out exactly what it meant to us, but if you could imagine say Bradman's 1948 Australians sailing off to England and going down with all hands, that's the sort of effect it had on us.

Mick O'Regan: Now they were called 'the Babes', and they had an average age I think of 22, 23, but it was the elan, the panache with which they played that made them so famous. In any number of articles I've read in preparing for this interview, it keeps talking about how they were a tonic for the nation, that it was like there was an investment in hope placed in these young men who kept returning on that investment by winning these great games, by playing quality football, and actually raising the spirits of not only Manchester, but the nation itself.

Jeff Connor: Well absolutely, because sport in those days, certainly here and probably in Australia as well, was about entertainment. In those days it wasn't about business, we went along to be entertained. There were no sponsor's logos on jerseys, there was very little in terms of shareholdings in clubs, we just went along to be entertained by these kids, and that's what they did to us.

Mick O'Regan: When the news broke, you were 12. Do you remember where you were when you found out?

Jeff Connor: I remember exactly where I was. I was playing truant from school, I was in Manchester, I'd been to the afternoon performance at the news theatre on Oxford Road where they showed cartoons, and I was on my way out, and it was a horrible day, something like today, there was the newspaper placard saying 'Munich disaster: many feared dead'. I went straight home, and my father who was a rabid Manchester United fan, taken me to my first game, and he was in a state of shock, he didn't even ask why I wasn't at school, and it went on from there really, and really, we were just numbed.

Mick O'Regan: I suppose any death is a terrible thing, but the death of young people seems to make it that much worse. What happened in the immediate aftermath of the disaster? I know that they were trying to get back to England for a game against Wolverhampton, and that game was postponed. And then famously when they played Wolverhampton, there was a blank page where the team sheet would have normally been because the man who took over from Matt Busby as coach, Jimmy Murphy, said later, he simply didn't know who was going to play. What was it like when Man-U regrouped to re-enter playing football?

Jeff Connor: I remember the first match that played which was against Sheffield Wednesday in the FA Cup, and my father took me along to that. Quite honestly, I've never known a night of such passion, and well sadness really. Like you say, Jimmy Murphy cobbled together some sort of side, not a particularly good side. I mean you had to feel sorry for any opposition really, because they were just borne along by this tremendous will for them to win, and of course famously, we got to the Cup Final that year, we lost dubiously. Any opposition didn't have a chance.

Mick O'Regan: In lots of the commentary at the moment, and also in your book, there's obviously criticism that the survivors weren't adequately cared for by the club, and there are some what seemed to be shocking examples of players who survived, who were asked to leave club-owned houses a year later, as the club wanted to put fit, new players into those premises. After writing The Lost Babes, what's your assessment of the way in which the survivors were treated?

Jeff Connor: I've been criticised for this obviously by Manchester United, but really I was only quoting what some of the survivors said, and some of them, obviously not Sir Bobby Charlton, remained fairly bitter about the way the club has prospered and grown on the legend of Munich without doing very much to help them along. I mean people say Well you should put it in the context of the era when there was very little in the way of insurance and counselling, things like this. You've got to remember that it's 40 years, '98, before Manchester United got their fingers out and even gave them a testimonial. Forty years is an awful long time; I mean it raised money for them, they got 47,000-pounds each, but you know, they were old men by then, there's not a lot they could do with it.

Also Manchester United cocked up the testimonial, spectacularly. They chose to double it up as a farewell to Eric Cantona, and of course it became the Eric Cantona Show. The Munich survivors again found themselves on the periphery of everything. And even now, United don't seem to have learned the lesson, because there's a memorial service today which has been covered by Manchester United TV, Manchester United TV decided that they were going to charge the BBC, British Broadcasting Corporation, 70,000-pounds for the coverage of it. Commerce is still to the forefront for them.

Mick O'Regan: So Man-U, with their own television station, which we've discussed before on this program, are actually recording the event, but then charging the BBC to broadcast it?

Jeff Connor: There's been disputes between the BBC and Sir Alex Ferguson, and Manchester United for as long as I can remember, and in fact Ferguson doesn't even do post-match interviews with the BBC now. So it just seems a shame that something that should be celebrated and remembered, has now become a commercial battleground really.

Mick O'Regan: Now of course it's interesting because there are lots of comparisons that are now made between Alex Ferguson and Matt Busby, particularly in the way that Matt Busby in the mid-'50s moulded this team of young players with enormous potential, obviously the stand-out being Duncan Edwards. And then 40 years later in the mid-'90s, Alec Ferguson, with the likes of David Beckham and Paul Scholes and the Neville brothers and Nicky Butt, had a similarly young team of unreasonably talented stars. How do you see that comparison, do you think there's a genuine basis to look at Matt Busby and Alex Ferguson in the same breath?

Jeff Connor: It's slightly different Mick, because Busby Babes basically had been at the club since a very early age, and most of them were from Manchester, which makes a crucial difference. Paul Scholes, Gary Neville are Mancunians, David Beckham's from London, Ryan Giggs, one we should mention, is a Welshman. They did put together a fantastic youth team, they all played together in the youth team, that won everything, as did the Busby Babes, in the early to mid-'50s; it's very, very hard to compare them because Ferguson has vast sums of money to spend; Matt had virtually nothing. There are similarities; I think they share the same philosophy about football. Manchester United currently are probably the most exciting team in the League, and have been, whether winning or losing, for the last decade.

Mick O'Regan: Jeff Connor, the author of 'The Lost Babes: Manchester United and the Forgotten Victims of Munich'. It's published by Harper Sport.

Now to a preview of next week's program, when we'll hear from an extraordinary sportsman. Erik Weihenmeyer is a blind mountaineer who, together with his sighted climbing partner Gavin Attwood, led an expedition into the Himalayas which included a group of blind Tibetan orphans.

Now climbing in the Himalayas is tough at the best of times, and as people like Australian mountaineer, Lincoln Hall know only too well, in bad conditions, it's nothing short of life threatening. So how does a blind climber, even with the help of a sighted companion, deal with the unexpected dangers of falling rocks or slabs of ice. Even if you can hear them, how do you avoid them?

Erik Weihenmeyer: It's something I think about a lot. I mean I've had a friend who was climbing an 8,000-metre peak and he finished the peak, he was safe, he was on the train below the glacier and he just happened to turn around and see this giant boulder rolling out, and he just dashed to the left, and it just missed him. And so I think, Gosh, if something like that happened to me, how would I react? But I have dealt, obviously, with a lot of rock and ice falls. I was on Kilimanjaro on actually a steeper face and we were climbing at night time, and there were some rocks rolling down the face, and I dove to the left and I heard the rock flying by to the right.

So you know, your ear sometimes can be a good cue, they can help you quite a bit. I have a pretty good sense about ice fall, and also I'm probably more conservative, like when I'm climbing an ice face, I'm belaying my friend up, and I know there's going to be a lot of ice falling down; I'll make sure I'm like under an overhang or something like that, so I'm actually probably always thinking about that and probably a little extra conservative.

Mick O'Regan: Right, Gavin, when you're climbing with Eric, he's just explained obviously that you can give him those immediate directions to help him anticipate what's immediately in front of him. Is there also a case of at the beginning of a climb saying 'OK, the first 2 kilometres is going to be like this ...' that the general contours of the climb you can impart to Eric to give him an overall sense of what's overhead?

Gavin Attwood: Yes, very much so, that's very true. Erik likes to be very well prepared going into climbs, and often will research the climb ahead of time himself, and I'll do the same, and we'll have conversations before we even drive, or travel to the location. So we both have as much information as possible, in part because Erik can't see it, but also because it's just safer to have all this information about the terrain, the conditions, the severity of the climb, the weather that's going to be coming in later, all this kind of information is extremely important. And having climbed with Erik for a number of years, I know that this is all part of the picture that he likes to have before we go on a climb or an adventure.

Erik Weihenmeyer: Sometimes we actually feel a tactile map of the mountain, if we can get a hold of it. Like Everest has in the American Alpine Museum, a tactile structure of Mount Everest in that ridge, the Lotsi and Nutsi and all the other big peaks along the ridge, so I was able to actually feel the route that we were going to take up and get a mental map in my mind.

Mick O'Regan: So what sort of scale model is it?

Erik Weihenmeyer: It's about a half a metre tall, and it's about literally 2 metres long. So it's a really big map that you can feel.

Mick O'Regan: Because the other thing I've heard you say, Erik, which I found utterly fascinating, was you spoke of being on the slopes of Everest and an extraordinary lightning storm hit, and as the thunder rolled through the valleys and peaks of the Himalayan system, you said that through your highly developed sense of hearing, you could almost echo-locate, you could actually sort of imagine the contours of the land from the nature of the sound. Could I get you to elaborate on that?

Erik Weihenmeyer: Sure. I mean humans do something that bats do, you know, it's sonar, it's basically echo location, and a lot of blind people will actually click as they walk. I've seen in the States where they click their mouth, and they're getting like an echo locator. When a blind person walks into like the lobby of a building, a lot of times they'll take their cane and tap it against the ground, and they'll get an echo. It tells them where the walls are, where the ceilings are. I can, when I'm listening, I can hear when I'm walking down a hallway and I can pass an open door, I can hear the open space through the door, versus the closed space in the hallway.

So blind people are using this all the time, sighted people could use it too, but you don't pay attention to it because you don't need to use it. But on Everest, and on other mountains I'm definitely using it all the time, listening for the rocks to my left or right, listening for the open spaces, the drop-offs on one side. On the summit you can hear space moving forever, infinitely, it's a really powerful sound.

Mick O'Regan: Tell me about that. You actually have a sense that you're no longer in a confined space at all?

Erik Weihenmeyer: Oh yes, when I stand on top of summits, I mean it's more like you're standing in space. The only way I can describe it is it feels like you've been swallowed by sky, there's sound vibrations that are being created by your movement, and those are moving through space, but they're not bouncing off of anything and coming back at you, they're just moving forever, and it's this vast, infinite sound of space that is very, very humbling.

Mick O'Regan: The remarkable Erik Weihenmeyer. More on him, and the documentary made about him and his expedition, next week.

Now before I head off, I need to correct a mistake from last week's show on what it means to be a good sport. When I introduced Debbie Simms I should have said she works at the Australian Sports Commission, not the Australian Institute of Sport. They're related, but they're not the same.

Thanks to Andrew Davies for producing the program and to Jim Ussher for technical production. Thanks for your company.

Guests

Frank Farina
Coach of the Queensland Roar football team.

Jeff Connor
Author and journalist.

Publications

Title: The Lost Babes: Manchester United & the Forgotten Victims of Munich
Author: Jeff Connor
Publisher: Harper Sport

Presenter

Mick O'Regan

Producer

Andrew Davies