When a football legend disappears in the land of football, the question of building a statue arises. After the death of Robert Charlton – alias Bobby – on Saturday October 21 at the age of 86, the question is moot: the greatest player in the history of English football had his own for fifteen years already.
Inaugurated at the end of May 2008, the statuary tribute to the great architect of the only world championship title of the country that invented football, in 1966, sits in front of the emblematic Old Trafford stadium, “the theater of dreams” of Manchester United , his lifelong club, whose colors he defended from 1956 to 1973. Knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1994, “Sir Bobby” was diagnosed with dementia in November 2020.
With the Red Devils, Charlton dreamed bigger by winning trophies: three English championship titles, a Cup and a European Champion Clubs’ Cup. But he also had nightmares, being among the rare survivors – at barely 20 years old – of one of the most significant tragedies in sporting history: the 1958 air disaster which cost his life, on the snowy runway of the airport. Munich, twenty-one members of the Mancunian club and his entourage, including eight of his teammates. Connecting for a fuel stop in Bavaria after the English players played a European semi-final in Belgrade, the plane was trying to take off unsuccessfully for the third time when it hit a house and caught fire.
Revenge on life
Marked in his flesh, unconscious and injured, young Bobby was also in his mind. ” Why me ? Why am I still here safe and sound with a little scratch on my head? It is unfairhe wrote decades later in his autobiography. It took me a really long time to get over all of this. »
This ordeal dictated his life like his career, he who had promised Matt Busby, emblematic manager of Manchester United also seriously injured in the accident, to rebuild the club and bring it back to the top. Winners of the European Cup in 1968, ten years after the tragedy which had wiped out a large part of this young and talented team of “Busby Babes”, Charlton and his partners took an incredible revenge on life.
On May 29, 1968 at Wembley Stadium, he scored two goals in a victory (4-1) against Benfica Lisbon of one of his alter egos in the football pantheon, the Portuguese Eusebio. Forming ‘the Trinity’ alongside the brilliant George Best and the impressive Denis Law, Charlton led Manchester United to an English club’s first European title.
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