Coach who put heart and soul into north

PETER JACKSON
THE MAN TRULY IN THE KNOW

Steve Borthwick’s anointment revives England’s tradition of northern head coaches, the most colourful of whom began his sporting life playing football for Blackburn Rovers.
John Burgess, Salford born and bred, grew up watching Manchester United at Old Trafford before the Luftwaffe bombed it during the Second World War. They could not obliterate a pre-war memory which the schoolboy Burgess treasured from a reserve match in the mid-Thirties.
It featured Johnny Carey, then a 20-year-old from Dublin who would go on to captain United’s revered ‘Busby Ba...

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