When it was all over and his playing days were done, Nobby Stiles would make light of the brutal physical blows he had faced along the way. All part and parcel of making himself a target in the role Sir Matt Busby assigned him, he was happy to relate.
‘I had to sort people out,’ he said, before Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia began to fray his brain. ‘I had to win the ball because without it, the greatest talent in the world couldn’t begin to operate.’
He gave as good as he got, even in his first three years at Manchester United when no one had yet diagnosed his chronically poor eyesight and, in Stiles’s words, ‘I would try to get along in the fog.