HOLT: Standing by the old Munich runway, it's where to find Man United's soul

In a clearing in a forest, a gravel path gives way to a square of tarmac that is about the size of a football pitch. It is all that is left of what was once the runway at Munich-Riem airport. It was from a point near there that the Busby Babes began their final journey on February 6th 1958.

There are two thick white lines running down the middle of the tarmac, the remnants of airport markings. But there is not much else to identify it. Even those lines are stained by tyre tracks, tell-tale signs of kids finding a hidden spot to spin cars in roaring circles, doing doughnuts after dark.

The echoes of the saddest moments in Manchester United’s history whisper at you as you stand there, gazing into the distance where the runway once led. ‘It’s now or never,’ Roger Byrne, United’s skipper, said as the British European Airways twin-engine Elizabethan sat there on the tarmac, preparing to make its third take-off attempt.

When Sir Bobby Charlton, the last living survivor of the disaster that killed eight Manchester United players, regained consciousness as he lay in the snow amid the plane’s wreckage at the other end of the runway, he saw Byrne still strapped in his seat and realised straight away that he was dead.

The old control tower, an ochre outlier beside the glass frontages of the shopping mall and the international congress centre that have been built on the old airfield, is the only other remnant of Munich-Riem. To stare up at it is to imagine the horror that gripped the people who occupied it that February evening and saw the Elizabethan ploughing through the snow.

It is still hard to reconcile the horrors of those moments 65 years ago with the everyday life that unfolds around the crash site now. In late afternoon on