Harry’s Game, Harry Gregg with Roger Anderson, Mainstream, hb, £15.99



THIS is the autobiography that former Manchester United goalkeeper Harry Gregg should have been persuaded not to publish. By laying bare his soul, he has rewritten the general historical consensus that he was a good bloke. This is not the Harry Gregg who falls off the pages here: he is easier described as a hard-hearted, unforgiving man, obsessed by a past he cannot come to terms with.

His primary discontent lies with the Munich air disaster of 1958, when many of his colleagues at Old Trafford perished. Acclaimed as the hero of the hour after pulling a mother and baby from the wreckage, Gregg will have none of it: ‘Every anniversary the phone calls start. It doesn’t matter if I don’t feel like re-opening the wounds. Harry Gregg, Hero of Munich, has become public property, but my life is not Munich.’

Yet it is. It is Gregg’s unique insider’s focus on the tragedy that is the core of this book. He describes the tension after two failed take-offs, the nerves of the players as the pilot tried again to get airborne, and the eerie joke by Johnny Berry: ‘I don’t know what you’re laughing at. We are all going to get killed here.’

Then the nightmare: ‘One second it was light, the next dark, then something cracked my skull. I was hit again at the front.’

The heartache: ‘Roger (Byrne) was dead. There wasn’t a blemish and his eyes were open. I always regretted that I didn’t close his eyes.’

Post-Munich, Gregg became a different man, crippled by a sense of injustice. He points an accusing finger at Matt Busby for not demanding a better deal from the club for the survivors. Gregg was voted best keeper in the world for a string of starring displays for Northern Ireland at the 1958 World Cup finals. Yet the true tragedy is that he never recovered from the mental scars of Munich.

Harry’s Game is available at the Books Direct price of £12.79 plus £1.95 p&p on 0870 165 8585