Harry Gregg - Club Career

Club Career

Gregg started his career with Windsor Park Swifts, the reserve team of Linfield, before signing for his local club Coleraine. At the age of 18 he earned a move across the Irish Sea to Doncaster Rovers. In December 1957 he transferred to Manchester United for £23,000, a world record fee for a goalkeeper at the time.

During his United career he kept a total of 48 clean sheets. He is sometimes called 'The Hero of Munich' because he pulled some of his team mates from the burning plane during the Munich air disaster - including Bobby Charlton, Jackie Blanchflower and Dennis Viollet. Among others he helped were Vera Lukić, the pregnant wife of a Yugoslav diplomat and her daughter, Vesna, as well as his badly-injured manager Sir Matt Busby.

Gregg is rated by many as one of the best – if not the very best – goalkeepers Manchester United ever had, yet he achieved no medals to justify this claim – made all the more frustrating for him by the fact that he played for the club during one of their most successful periods. He was ruled out of the 1963 FA Cup victory due to a serious shoulder injury, and a succession of injuries meant that he could not play enough games to qualify for a league championship medal in the 1964–65 and 1966–67 title-winning campaigns. He was also on the losing side in the 1958 FA Cup Final and United's decline in league form that season after losing so many players in the Munich tragedy meant that they finished ninth in a league that they had previously looked capable of winning. A year later United's league form recovered but they finished runners-up to Wolves.

He was transferred to Stoke City in the summer of 1967. He retired a year later.