Because he doesn’t shout about it, letting his feelings be known to millions all the time in the contemporary way, it’s easy to forget what a giant presence Bryan Robson is at Manchester United.
When Sir Bobby Charlton was struggling, Robson quietly took on some of his tasks as the face and figurehead of the club and though no-one is broadcasting the fact, he has filled the great man’s giant boots as the club’s elder statesman now.
There’s something very fitting about that, because for the players of real genius who’ve pulled on the jersey - Sir Bobby, Roy Keane, Paul Scholes - Robson was, and is, one of the first picks in an all-time best United XI. He’s a link back to the past, at a time when the memory of Busby and the spirit of Wembley, 1968 dims in the collective memory. The look on Robson’s face when I encountered him at Nobby Stiles’ funeral, a few years back, told you what the members of that great team meant to him. He was devastated.
The current crop of young players were not even born when Robson was United’s Captain Marvel – delivering in a way which would be remembered far more, had he played during the club’s peak Ferguson years.
But you could have heard a pin drop when he sat down with the under-18s and under-21s as part of a new project he is involved with, encouraging young players to take proper investment advice and avoid the chancers and financial predators on the edge of football.
Robson is working on this project with one of his United contemporaries, Simon Andrews, who was just outside the first team squad in the late 1980s and is now a financial specialist. ’I just got fed up of picking up another newspaper and reading that someone else in sport is bankrupt or been ripped off,’ Robson tells me. ‘I’ve
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