For a man who seems to have so much of the Gorbals still ingrained in his nature, the black wit, the lack of fear, the blunt assertiveness, Paddy Crerand seldom returns home to Glasgow.
The city, and his family’s Irish emigrant background, continues to be a defining influence on Crerand’s attitude and politics, but he comes back now as a visitor, however comfortable and familiar the old surroundings are.
“I’ve got friends here from years and years ago,” he says, before suddenly stopping himself. “Imagine me saying that, ‘from years and years ago’.” He sounds almost wistful, but that does not rest easily with a man so fiercely sure of himself.
Crerand is part of Glasgow folklore, but as much for the impact he made as the aggressive, implacable heart of the Manchester United midfield that allowed George Best, Bobby Charlton and Denis Law to wreak their own kind of irrepressible havoc on defences, as his time at Celtic.
Crerand returned to Glasgow last night to be inducted into the Scottish football hall of fame -- along with Terry Butcher, Ronnie Simpson and RS McColl -- an honour that meant something precious to the 72-year-old because of the way he could frame it in his memory. He looks at the list of players inducted before him and sees the heroic figures he once admired.
“All the old guys, like Charlie Tully, were fantastic; that’s how far back I go,” he says in a gruff voice that has not lost the rasping edges of his upbringing after 48 years of living in Manchester. “I met Willie Woodburn [the former Rangers defender] many years ago in Edinburgh and told him he was the best centre-half I’d ever seen. He looked at me and didn’t know what to say.”
There is little chance of ever misunderstanding Crerand’s point. He has never been an apologist for anything, and holds his views with a firm, unappeasable certainty. As a pundit for MUTV, United’s in-house television channel, he is known for being a bold, almost blinkered supporter of the club, but he makes no concessions to that urge.
It is the same with his views of Scottish football, even if he only glances back across the border when Celtic and Rangers are playing each other. Crerand looks at the state of the game he once knew to produce great player after great player and laments the loss of those old sureties. Where, he would say, is the next Jim Baxter, the next Jimmy Johnstone, the next Law, the next Kenny Dalglish? It pains him, but Crerand has never been timid about expressing his opinion.
“The advent of money now has done a great deal of damage to the Scottish game,” he says. “Any players of any talent go down to England, the better players, and I feel sorry for the Scotland manager. He has a thankless job. When I went to England in the sixties, you could go into the middle of Manchester, stop somebody and ask them to name the Scottish team and they’d get about eight players right. Now if you did that it would be Darren Fletcher and they wouldn’t have a clue who the rest of them are. That’s sad.”
Crerand only won 16 caps, which was a measure of the quality of player Scotland could call upon, but also his own ferocity and intransigence. He was sent off in a World Cup qualifying tie against Czechoslovakia in a in 1961, which was considered unseemly, but also had little tolerance for the selection committee that was in charge of the national team at that time.
If his cap haul is a regret, it will hold little value to a player who was part of one of the great Manchester United teams under Sir Matt Busby -- although he describes Sir Alex Ferguson as the best manager, “and if Sir Matt was sitting here, God rest his soul, he’d say the same” -- and a European Cup winner amongst many other honours. He reserves his praise now for a successor in the United and Scotland midfield, but admits that Fletcher is, at times, a lone source of admiration.
“He was underrated in Manchester for quite some time,” Crerand says. “I saw him when he came down at 15, 16, and I fancied him straight away. He’s not a beautiful runner, he’s a bit ungainly, but he’s got a great football brain and his range of passing is unbelievable. It took [United fans] two or three years to realise. He used to get a bit of abuse, but now if you ask anyone, he’s the first name on the team sheet. Unfortunately, the standard of Scottish football isn’t as good as it should be. How you cure that I don’t know.”
Then Crerand tells a story of meeting David Taylor, the UEFA general secretary, as they left the Emirates Stadium after the Champions League semi-final second-leg that saw United reach the final at Arsenal’s expense in 2009. Fletcher had been harshly sent-off, and Crerand urged Taylor to rescind the red card. “He said, ‘oh I can’t do anything’,” Crerand recalls witheringly. “But I said, ‘you’ve got to, it’s obvious he shouldn’t have been sent-off’.”
That’s Crerand at his most genuine: the old streetfighter, battling for his cause, sure of his purpose, and unforgiving.
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