By Dave Bowler

Perhaps the finest football films are those where the game is but a backdrop to a human story, wider in consequence and context than simply kicking a bag of wind across the grass.

They don’t come much finer than the BBC’s 2008 documentary in the “One Life” series, “The Munich Air Disaster – Harry Gregg’s Journey”. As the title suggests, the film sees Harry Gregg, Manchester United goalkeeper and survivor of the crash, retrace his steps from more than 50 years ago, back to Belgrade where United got a 3-3 draw to progress to the next round of the Europe an Cup, and then on to Munich were his friends, and England’s finest team, were blown away in the slush and the ice and the snow.

That in itself would be drama enough, but Gregg was not just a survivor of Munich. Because of his actions, three other s lived, civilians with nothing to do with football, the forgotten people according to Gregg who reminds us that other people were on board that aircraft, and that their lives were just as important, if less widely celebrated.

For those who did not perish, the guilt of the survivor inevitably remains. But so too must a fear of flying. Emblematic of the way he is, Gregg treats the issue with pragmatism, saying it’s something that he had to learn to do in life, or he could forget the life he had – a footballer that can’t fly, Bergkamp’s example notwithstanding, is a footballer with no future. But even then, as he thinks of that flight back to Belgrade, even this bluff, tough Northern Irishman admits, “I sit, I look out of the window. Maybe I hear sounds other passengers don’t hear”. Whether that’s a sensitivity to each note of the roar of the engine, or a sound echoing down 50 years, that’s for Gregg.

And while this story is captured on film, there’s so much more that is clearly captive inside Gregg’s mind, not open for public consumption. That’s the emotional core of the film, the fact that Gregg is from a different age, a time when people held their problems, their traumas, their fears much closer to the chest. Born before the war, Gregg is of a generation and a time that is rapidly disappearing. He’s a hard man, make no mistake, from the old school, a school that taught duty, discipline and responsibility before self. Had it not been for that upbringing, you wonder if he could have done what he did that day when death placed its unforgiving grip on those on that plane.

Because Gregg did not just survive. He cheated death. Not of his own life, but of three others. After the plane had refuelled at Munich, it made two abortive take off attempts, the passengers disembarked and then returned to try again. Sitting near him, colleague Johnny Berry said, “We’re all going to get killed here”. Gregg recalls, “I saw the undercarriage come up, then it was tearing and darkness and daylight. Tearing and sparks, flashes. I thought I was in hell. Then I could feel blood running down my face. I was afraid to put my hand to the top of my head because I thought my head had been taken off, like a hard boiled egg.”

As the plane lay shattered, having hit a fence and a house, with a fuel dump nearby exploding in its wake, Gregg crawled through a hole and got out and for a moment, felt the real dread, surely the worst feeling of all, that he was the only survivor. “Then I heard an infant cry”. Despite being told to run by the plane’s crew because of the threat that the plane would explode, he clambered back into the plane and found the child, rescued her, gave her to someone on the ground then went back again and found her mother and physically kicked her through the tiny hole in the plane in order to save her life. And, as it turned out, a second, for Vera Lukic was pregnant.

Still it wasn’t enough. He propped Matt Busby up in his seat, tied up Jackie Blanchflower’s limp, useless arm as he cried that his back was broken, helped cover Roger Byrne. The rescuers arrived on the scene and Gregg was taken away. To this day, he wonders if there was more he could have done. Sitting in the hospital, he heard over the intercom, “Herr Swift ist kaput”. “That upset me. I didn’t realise that anybody was dead until that moment, despite seeing it all around me. Until death comes in your own door, you don’t realise what it feels like”.

Gregg returned home and returned to the game. “I couldn’t wait to get back, to fight, to argue, to swear, to play. It was the safety valve. Football saved my sanity”. Nowadays, anyone going through what Gregg endured would have counselling, therapy, years of treatment. Perhaps people were different then, their expectations of life different. Perhaps the hardships of war taught something. For better or worse or both, maybe we’re softer, more brittle now. But Gregg got back to doing his job, living his life, and even endured the loss of his wife just a couple of years later. Football did save his sanity, as routine, work, and getting on with it soften can.

Meeting  the Lukic family, including the then unborn boy, Gregg is clearly at a loss for what to say. Away from them, he sums it up, sums himself up, sums a bygone age up. “It keeps coming out that they want to thank me. Nobody owes me anything.” Duty, responsibility, service. Forgotten creeds.

There’s also a sense that Gregg feels that not only were his friends and colleagues taken from him, but his life was stolen too. Forever more, he’s Harry Gregg, survivor of Munich, saver of lives, and that simply is not the way he sees himself. He is Harry Gregg, a damned good goalkeeper, perhaps the best in the world for a little while. That’s his self image, who he feels he is, the things he wants to talk about.

But history won’t let him. History wants to talk of Munich, of the flowers of Manchester, of Duncan Edwards. As Gregg says when standing inside the terminal building at Munich, “Because of what happened when we left this building, Manchester United became not only a great football club but an institution. I’m very proud to have been a small part of it.”

Harry Gregg is a very considerable man. One Yugoslavian family was undoubtedly the richer for his actions these last 50 years, countless thousands of football fans had a better Saturday afternoon for many years while he was playing the game. Both are achievements any one of us would be proud to call our own.