United

There is an ambiguity about the title of veteran TV director James Strong’s conventional yet deeply moving football saga that speaks, in the grandest of terms, of the global game’s social importance. The 1958 plane crash that killed 23 people, including several young players and officials of Manchester United, brought together club, country and cross-continental football lovers like never before or since.

Under the radical coaching style of the enigmatic Jimmy Murphy (a superb David Tennant) and the gruff but fatherly administrative touch of the great Sir Matt Busby (a grizzled Dougray Scott), some of the youngest players ever to play top flight English football had turned Manchester United into the most celebrated club on UK soil. It was Busby’s expansion plans for his team (known affectionately as ‘Busby’s Babes’) and football in general that saw his charges try to leave Germany in the midst of a fierce snow storm, primarily to make an Association-imposed deadline to qualify for a Saturday league match. (The English football hierarchy is portrayed as staid and ruthlessly traditional in Strong’s film.)

In the first half hour of the made-for-British-television production, autumnal shades symbolically aligned with warm memories; so dapper and chipper are the young lads as they go about wooing girls, smoking pipes and changing the face of English football, one can’t help but get caught up in the rose-coloured remembrances of late ‘50s optimism. It’s a dreamlike world peopled by strapping athletes, bringing to mind films like Eight Men Out (1988), The Natural (1984) and Australia’s own Phar Lap (1983) – works that reflect glowingly on the integrity of the sporting contest at a time when athletes represented the very best aspirations of working-class kids.

In Strong’s film, that kid is the great Bobby Charlton (a wide-eyed Jack O’Connell). Three years into his term with Manchester Utd, he’s one of the few of his contemporaries yet to be picked in the starting line-up, despite showing incredible prowess. (Charlton would eventually become one of the greatest players ever to lace a pair of boots.) One of the few team members to survive the crash (another was square-jawed goalkeeper Harry Gregg, played by Ben Peel), Charlton struggles with grief, his inability to function in the aftermath of the crash and his reluctance to return to the playing field to help a club gutted by the tragedy in every respect. 

There’s no football in United; all you need to know about key match results is conveyed via elegant graphics. If you’ve never cried at a football score, try holding back when the result of the first post-crash game comes into focus. (As Derby County fan, I’ve cried plenty of times.) The lack of game action may have been a budgetary decision; any wide shots that need to convey the period – the famed home ground, Old Trafford, or factory backdrops – are entirely computer generated. But it’s not missed, so effectively conveyed is the spirit of the team and the passion of these young men in their prime.

Its gorgeous period detail is most effective in small moments – brushed-leather boots, rounded-steel studs, dressing-rooms floors made of uneven concrete. Strong’s film is most certainly made for lovers of the World Game, but by no means is it only for them. This is a sad story of young men’s lives taken in their prime and, like the emblazoned phoenix that United players wear over their hearts, the spirit of a club that rose again after their passing.