The Greatest Football Story Ever Told - Part 2

As part of the build-up to Tour 2015, presented by Aon, we’ll be reflecting on some of the most important and unforgettable times in the Reds’ history - something we believe to be the greatest football story ever told. We'll also be hearing from some of the key personalities who have helped create that story. In chapter two of our series, we reflect on how United recovered from a devastating blow to Old Trafford...

By the time of United’s second league title, Ernest Mangnall and his players had a glorious home to adorn with silverware. Old Trafford, the club’s third stadium, had opened its doors in February 1910, and was widely recognised as the most impressive structure in English football.

Alas, the immediate high of winning the 1910/11 league title – the Reds’ second in three seasons – would soon pass. Mangnall left the club to manage Manchester City, and his star-studded team began to drift apart, with the departure of captain Charlie Roberts a particular jolt to the club and its fans.

By the commencement of the First World War, United had become also-rans in the First Division. Wartime football meant an enormous shake-up for every team, and the Reds partook in the Lancashire section of the regionally reorganised league. While some clubs emerged positively from the shake-up of conflict when it ended four years later, United remained in a deep malaise and regularly yo-yoed between the First and Second Divisions.

From league champions and FA Cup winners, the Reds were suddenly strangers to silverware, starving the Old Trafford trophy cabinet with the exception of the Second Division winners’ trophy in 1935/36, having only narrowly averted the unthinkable of relegation to the Third Division just two years earlier.

But, just as sights were set on a settled stint in the top flight, the Second World War prompted a curtailment of league football which would last for seven long years. The Reds would feel the pain of war keener than any other club, with Old Trafford twice struck by German Luftwaffe bombs in four devastating months.

The minor damage caused by the first strike, in December 1940, was still being repaired when a second raid, in March 1941, devastated the stadium and destroyed much of the South Stand. The war itself meant that there was no pressing need to repair the damage in order to host games, but United’s ailing finances meant that the stadium remained in a state of disrepair for years.

"There were schoolboys lined up on each touchline at Old Trafford,” recalled renowned Manchester artist Harold Riley, who was among those juvenile volunteers. “We walked across the stadium with buckets collecting glass out of the pitch, filling up buckets with glass and rubble from the blast." Such was the extent of the destruction and the timescale of its saturation, a tree was allowed to grow up through the debris of the fallen stand.

But, not for the first time, Manchester United would rise from the wreckage. Upon the post-war return of football, the Reds would temporarily play their home games at Manchester City’s Maine Road while Old Trafford was steadily repaired. Almost a decade later, at the start of the 1949/50 season, the Theatre of Dreams would be ready for re-opening. By that point, the club’s board had made a decision which would dramatically reroute the course of history: the appointment of a young, untried new manager by the name of Alexander Matthew Busby.

Credit: manutd.com