"Your first hope is to get them into the first team. It’s one of the funny things in football when a player turns a corner - the ones in the first team never see it coming. In turn, that is one of the horrible parts of football – you can be a terrific player for ten years and then some young lad comes in and takes your place. But progress is progress. It was obvious to me that they were going to be something special that year in the Lancashire ‘A’ League. They were battering everyone. And the Lancashire ‘A’ League was a tough league.
"Teams would use it for senior players coming back from injury; Alan Hansen and Gary Gillespie played in that league for Liverpool. I'll always remember when we played Liverpool. I was down in London at the time and I phoned Eric Harrison to get the result. ‘Best performance I’ve seen from a United team,’ he told me. 'We absolutely demolished Liverpool 5-0’. Alan Hansen had scored an own-goal! That team went the whole season undefeated until the last two league games, losing both of them. But that was only because they were playing in the FA Youth Cup semi-final and the final at a similar time. They were unbelievable. That season was the indication that they were going to be special."