A shining star ornament placed at Denis Law’s right boot on Manchester United’s Holy Trinity statue gave out a frail light and people arrived with bouquets to provide some colour, but there was no getting away from the bleakness.
It was a grey, stone-cold day and the last of the legendary triumvirate, linking United to a glorious past, had gone.
The messages attached to the flowers thanked Law for ‘the memories’ and for the absolute certainty that he would deliver for fans. If you needed a player to ‘score a goal to save your life’ stated a message inked in black onto a replica shirt, then you would ‘send for the Lawman.’
It was a fair assessment. The statue’s depiction of him – flanked by George Best and Bobby Charlton, with right arm aloft, index finger pointing to the sky as it always did when he scored, and a trace of his mischievous smile – is a lasting reminder that Law was the member of that triumvirate with most conviction and least apprehension. The bringer of sparks and flames.
It took him longer to be loved here, given that Best and Charlton had been United man and boy – Charlton emerging so haunted from the enormity of Munich. But he was the warrior soul.
A fundamental part of the fable without which there would not have been the modern Manchester United of Sir Alex Ferguson, Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney. That’s why they called him ‘the King’ here.
Denis Law (centre), the last of Man United’s legendary triumvirate, passed away on Friday

Flowers and tributes were left at the base of the iconic statue by football fans on Saturday

Law is United’s third-highest goalscorer of all-time behind Wayne Rooney and Bobby Charlton
Charlton, who stands with right hand draped across Law’s left shoulder on the statue, always remembered a game in which the Scot went up against Liverpool defender Ron Yeats – a man being described as the New Colossus’ by his manager Bill Shankly, at the time.
He scarcely came up to Yeats’ shoulder, yet still needled him and chivvied him to distraction. ‘I remember thinking, “This is ridiculous. Impossible,”’ Charlton reflected years later. ‘And for anyone else but Denis, it certainly would have been,’.
These qualities were not lost on those laying down flowers and reflecting on the man’s gifts. ‘He put it all out there, didn’t he?,’ said supporter Ian Timpson. ‘He was honest, too. No rolling around on the pitch He gave as good as he got.’
The consequences of that firebrand spirit included a nine-game ban for his dismissal at Arsenal in 1967 in a match during which he and the home team’s Ian Ure kicked lumps out of each other. But in the period around the mid-60s, when Law was free of injury and at his peak, an imperviousness to danger made him sometimes unplayable.
Charlton always said that if found himself in space on the right or left, he would always look to get the ball to the near post where Law would be putting himself in the line of fire. ‘Never the back one, because Denis would never be there,’ Charlton related.
‘If I could get it to the near post, Denis was guaranteed to sneak half a yard and when it happened, the result was inevitable. This was a strength – almost an expression of himself as a player.’
Not bad for a puny, bespectacled kid from Aberdeen with such poor eyesight that he would play with one eye closed until his Huddersfield manager, Shankly, insisted on the corrective surgery which changed the course of his life.
That arch competitiveness would follow him deep into retirement, when he would watch his daughter, Diana, play hockey, as a forward for the Wilmslow club. Team-mates of hers were remembering, this weekend, an occasion when, with Law Snr spectating, Wilmslow were not awarded a penalty after she was fouled.

Law – known as The King of the Stretford End – was slight in stature but left his all on the pitch

For a period in the mid-60s an imperviousness to danger made Law sometimes unplayable

Law (pictured with Cristiano Ronaldo) was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and dementia
‘He let the referee know his feelings on this matter!’ one of the team related. ‘The competitiveness was still there and Di had it, too. He also addressed us as a team a few times. You can imagine what a motivation that was.’
There was the same edge when you tried to take him somewhere he didn’t want to go in interviews. His devastation at scoring the back-heeled derby goal for City in United’s relegation year of 1974 never seemed to leave him and he never wanted to discuss it.
‘How long did that feeling last?’ he replied, when I broached the subject, in a room overlooking the Old Trafford pitch in 2012. ‘How long ago was the game? There’s your answer.’
He was unflinching in the face of unimaginable sorrows, too – doing as much as any of Best’s former team-mates to win him back from alcoholism. The mission was a hopeless one, of course, leading to the grey day, in November 2005, when he and Charlton met at Stockport railway station for the journey south to London, to see Best in his hospital room there. It would be their last time together.
The three men who made up the fabled ‘Trinity’ were not particularly close. Their lives did not greatly intertwine beyond the confines of club. Charlton once said Law was ‘the loner to quite a sharp degree; the maverick Scot making his own sense of all that he found before him. Our good luck was to be thrown together.’
Law contended with some agonies unknown to the two men standing either side of him on that plinth. He suffered from degenerative arthritis and was more injury-prone than them.
It meant he missed the 1968 European Cup win over Benfica at Wembley – such a huge part of United’s legend – with a cartilage injury.
Take the five-minute walk along the montage of United’s glories running behind the statue, down past the old Munich clock on the corrugated red metal of Old Trafford’s south-east corner and into the Munich Tunnel displays, and you will see the consequence of this struggle for fitness.

Law, Sir Bobby Charlton (centre) and George Best (right) weren’t particularly close off the field

Law (third left, front row) missed the European Cup final win through a cartilage injury
Law features less prominently in the images of United’s story. He is no less cherished because of it.
The absolute fearlessness was still there nearly four years ago when he revealed the Alzheimer’s diagnosis which has taken his life, at the age of 84. He described very precisely how the illness was limiting him. ‘The time has come to tackle this head on, excuse the pun,’ he said in his statement that day. How very typical of the man.
A light has gone out and the trickle of fans filtering past the statue on Saturday will broaden out into something more substantial before United play Brighton on Sunday.
‘In Loving Memory of “The King”’, stated the handwritten message on a bouquet of red and white roses laid by a United employee on Saturday morning. ‘With deepest gratitude for everything.’ How this club needs his warrior spirit now.
Source From: Football | Mail Online
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