On February 7, 1958, the day after the doomed take-off of Flight 609 ZU from Munich airport, Jimmy Murphy, Matt Busby’s assistant, left for Germany to be with his boss and his boys. The words he delivered on his return were as follows: “I have seen the boys. Limbs and hearts may be broken, but the spirit remains. Their message is that the club is not dead – Manchester United lives on.”

In the context of the dead and the seriously injured it was an extraordinary message, yet it is one that the players left behind to make up some sort of a team – the reserves and the juniors and the third-teamers – took to their hearts. From the Munich air disaster, the story of renewal within Old Trafford is astonishingly stirring, one that can be given justice only by the recollection, 50 years on, of the players.

Two of the men suddenly thrust into the front line were Alex Dawson and Ian Greaves. Dawson was 17 and developing nicely as a centre forward in the reserves, yet Tommy Taylor’s death meant that hopeful eyes turned suddenly to him for goals. Greaves may have been 25, but his 20 previous appearances made him a senior citizen in a squad whose average age had plummeted overnight to 19.

The pair became staple members of a team who were juggling training sessions with funerals. And somehow, building an FA Cup run that took them all the way to Wembley.

“The first training session we turned up for, Jimmy took us away from Old Trafford,” Greaves recalled. “We hardly ever trained at The Cliff anyway, but that day he took us to White City, a dog track that was across the road. He was trying to remove the panic of the situation away from us.

“Having lost so many friends, it was hard to take; those first two or three weeks we were training and going to our friends’ funerals, too. Geoff Bent, the left back, was my best friend. I should have been on that trip myself, but because of an injury situation Geoff went instead. But that was the thing about Munich – we all lost a best friend.”

Dawson said: “Those older players had always encouraged me. They used to turn up to reserve games and give tips. Duncan [Edwards] I really liked. He’d say, ‘That’s what the boss likes to see: you moving around, listening, learning.’ When people like that were talking to you, you felt on a pedestal. And you wanted to remain up there. That’s why the club worked so well. We were the future – or we were supposed to be – except the future came round too quickly.

“We just had to try to put the situation out of our minds. We thought, ‘This is it, we have a chance of doing something.’ It was fantastic to get out there and know that you were doing something for the club and the people we’d lost.”

In that season postMunich, there were two matches of extraordinarily raw emotion. The first was Manchester United’s first game back, 13 days after the crash, in the fifth round of the Cup against Sheffield Wednesday, when a team were so hastily assembled that Stan Crowther, a signing from Aston Villa, played without having a single training session with his new side.

Before that match, Harry Gregg, the goalkeeper who had survived the crash and was back in the team, said in an interview with the Manchester Evening News: “The main job we have to do tonight is to show the world that Manchester United will rise again, that we are determined with all our hearts to see that new ambition come true.” Dawson recalled: “As the match drew closer, Jimmy was marvellous. ‘We’ll go out and we’ll show them,’ he said. ‘I want you to do this for the boys.’ We were doing that anyway, but he really focused us.”

Greaves said: “We were in the dressing-room and, at ten past seven, Stan Crowther arrived in a taxi. We didn’t know him – we just went out on the pitch and we didn’t even know what he could do.”

Dawson said: “In the dressing-room, I remember thinking, ‘Come on, let’s just get out there.’ This was my chance to repay those boys, but you didn’t want to think about it any more. I remember going down the tunnel to this amazing roar. It made you shiver and I wasn’t normally like that. I thought, ‘This is it, this is where the new Manchester United begins.’ ”

Greaves said: “We just got on with it. We had to. While you were playing, it just went from your mind, you were chasing a ball again and you didn’t feel sorry for yourself any more. You were playing a game of football, and not for your friends or the Munich disaster. Against Sheffield Wednesday, you just couldn’t allow your mind to go. Only when it stopped did it all come back. And then, driving back home, I’d be back where I was before, thinking, ‘How did it happen?’ ” But his patched-up United team had just won 3-0. Albert Quixall, the forward whose Wednesday side were in a no-win situation that night, said later: “I don’t think anyone who played in or watched the game will ever forget that night. No matter how well we played, they would have beaten us. They were playing like men inspired.”

The Evening News initially christened the new team “Murphy’s Chicks”, but as the Cup run continued they became Murphy’s Marvels. And Murphy was clearly the glue. In the quarter-finals they beat West Bromwich Albion. “I remember in the hotel before the game, the pianist was really going at it: Chopin, Mozart, the lot,” Greaves said. “We looked up and it was Jim. We couldn’t believe it, we didn’t even know he could play.”

However, with so many key men missing and fixture congestion taking its toll, the team soon started to struggle in the league, which made the Cup run more important. It seemed to infuse the players with a sense of mission. “The march to Wembley was uplifting and liberating, a new dawn,” Sir Bobby Charlton wrote in his autobiography. “This feeling of renewal, the idea that something could still be made out of the future, did more than anything to get me over the worst of the memories.”

The semi-final against Fulham was won 5-3 after a replay, with Dawson scoring a hat-trick, but always the players were driven by a common goal. “After that game, as always, I had my little private prayer in my church in Manchester and said to my friends who had gone, ‘There you are, I’ve done it for you. I just hope we can win it,’ ” Dawson said.

And so, miraculously, to the final, the other game of rare emotional intensity, against Nat Lofthouse’s Bolton Wanderers. United went there with almost the entire country, even Manchester City fans, supporting them, but only one win in the league since beating Fulham.

“We knew we were up against it in the final,” Dawson said. “Jimmy said to us beforehand, ‘You’ve done the hard bit, you’ve got us here. If it’s supposed to be ours, it’ll be ours.

The Lord will look after us.’ But that game was one bridge too far.

We’d played so many fixtures so quickly, we ran out of steam.”

Indeed, Bolton won 2-0 “and afterwards the thoughts of Munich came pouring back”, Dawson said. “But Jimmy said, ‘I was proud of you and you’ve made those boys proud, too.’ ” That day at Wembley, United’s shirt crest bore a phoenix rising from the flames. The team may not have won, but the symbol could not have been more appropriate.