Little Bear does not want to sleep for the winter! He knows that while he's asleep his friends will be having fun in the soft,
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' If David Lloyd-George was the most charismatic person I ever laid eyes on, Matt Busby was the most charismatic I have known, when he was the manager of Manchester United & I was a reporter travelling with the team.' Keith Dewhurst first saw United play in 1946. Ten years later he was writing about them for the " Manchester Evening Chronicle'. Half a lifetime later, he looks back on a passion that helped to shaped his life. On his journey from the terraces to the press box & then on to the game's inner sanctums, Dewhurst fell in love with a club & a game. A schoolboy fan when Busby arrived at Old Trafford, he was on the terraces as great teams took shape, & there as a reporter to witness the aftermath of the club's great tragedy
- the Munich air crash. He was there too on the road with Jimmy Murphy, United's assistant manager & coaching genius, as the team played on during Busby's long recovery. In Busby, he witnessed both the hero of football legend & the darker side of a master manipulator. But in Murphy, he found his hero. It was Murphy who would tutor him in football & dreams, & Busby's ambiguous nature. The friends Dewhurst made then, the players & the coaches, the lost & the saved, are with him still
- in memory, if no longer in life. " When You Put on a Red Shirt" is Dewhurst's homage to them & to his youth, evoking with vivid brilliance a lost era, & powerfully recapturing a world which is becoming myth.