When You Put on a Red Shirt: Memories of Matt Busby, Jimmy Murphy and Manchester United

(Paperback)

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A brilliant footballing memoir, in the tradition of My Father and Other Working-Class Football Heroes and Provided You Don't Kiss Me. 'When You Put on a Red Shirt is the story of dreamers, hard men who wanted to create perfection on the football pitch' Roddy Doyle Keith Dewhurst first fell in love with Manchester United as a schoolboy in 1946. Ten years later he was the travelling reporter with the team, enjoying unprecedented access to players and management. He was there as great teams took shape under the legendary manager Matt Busby, and as a witness to the aftermath of the club's great tragedy - the Munich air disaster. He was there too on the road with Jimmy Murphy, United's assistant manager and coaching genius, as the team played on during Busby's long recovery. In Busby, Dewhurst witnessed both the genius of football legend and the darker side of a master manipulator. When You Put on a Red Shirt is Dewhurst's homage to the players he knew then - both the lost and the saved - and to his youth, evoking with vivid brilliance a lost era, and powerfully recapturing a world which has become myth.

Reviews

When You Put on a Red Shirt is the story of dreamers, hard men who wanted to create perfection on the football pitch -- Roddy Doyle
Its evocation of a vanished age should be required reading for the Ronaldos and Rooneys of our day * Sunday Herald *
Glorious...if only all football books were this good * Four Four Two *
Fascinating...a memoir that will give pleasure to all football fans * Hunter Davies *
Keith Dewhurst brings to his subject the precision of a time-served journalist of the old school, the insights of a major dramatist and the uncompromising love of a lifelong supporter -- Alan Plater

Author Bio

Keith Dewhurst has been a yarn tester in a cotton mill, a reporter for the Manchester Evening Chronicle, and a columnist for the Guardian. Six of his seventeen stage plays have been premiered at the National Theatre, and he is the author of more than twenty television plays, two novels, two movies and a theatrical memoir.