From Metz feeding Bernd Schuster ham to Aberdeen lighting up the north, here are some of the great European shocks
1. Barcelona 1-4 Metz (agg: 5-6), 10 October 1984, Cup Winners’ Cup, first round
No one saw this coming – almost literally, because after Metz had lost the home leg 4-2 no French TV or radio station bothered to cover the seemingly pointless return match and the Camp Nou was only a quarter full. The pessimism surrounding Metz was understandable: their previous two away matches in the league had been a 6-0 defeat at Bordeaux and a 7-0 mauling at Monaco, and, after the Catalans had benefited from a series of mistakes to win the first leg 4-2, the Barcelona playmaker Bernd Schuster said he would “give the Metz players some ham when they come to our place to thank them for the presents that they give us tonight”.
“They really looked down on us – and that made us so angry,” Michel Ettore, the Metz goalkeeper, recalled recently. “We wanted to wipe away their insults.” After half an hour at Camp Nou, however, Barça’s belief grew even stronger as Lobo Carrasco fired past Ettore to make it 5-2 on aggregate. With less than an hour to go, Metz needed four goals. In the 38th minute Tony Kurbos hurtled down the right and, with the goalkeeper anticipating a cross, sent the ball, perhaps flukily, straight into the net from an acute angle. Sixty seconds later Metz carved open the Barça defence and Sánchez diverted a Kurbos cross into his own goal to leave Metz requiring “only” two more goals. Ten minutes into the second half the irrepressible Kurbos latched on to a sweet through ball and clipped it over the keeper to make it 5-5 on aggregate, but with Barça still in front on away goals. The home side attempted to rally but Ettore and his defenders produced improbable block after improbable block.
“Every time it seemed they were about to score we’d get a head, a foot or an arse in the way – we felt invincible,” Ettore said. In the 85th minute Metz tore forward again, the Senegal striker Jules Bocandé feinted his way to the byline and pulled back towards the penalty spot, where Kurbos, of course, arrived to lift it into the net and ignite ecstatic French celebrations. “I ran straight up to Schuster and bawled: ‘Where’s your ham now?’” Ettore said. “I don’t think he speaks French but he understood me that night.” Paul Doyle
2. Porto 4-3 Wrexham (agg: 4-4), 1984-85 Cup Winners’ Cup, first round
Wrexham were lucky to be in the Cup Winners’ Cup, having failed to fulfil the competition’s fairly obvious criterion. Shrewsbury had in fact won the Welsh Cup in 1984, but the Shrews could not represent Wales in European competition, the snag being that pesky border which placed Shrewsbury nine miles inside England. The beaten finalists, then, took their place.
But by 1984 Wrexham were a club in disarray. Back-to-back relegations in 1982 and 1983 had sent them spiralling from the Second Division to the Fourth, bringing financial hardship. They were left with only 14 professionals on their books and in their squad were three teenagers – Paul Nicholl, Gary Pugh and Kevin Jones – whose careers in football had begun in the summer courtesy of the government’s Youth Training Scheme because the club could not afford to pay them. They warmed up for the first leg with a 3-1 home defeat against Peterborough in front of 1,704 die-hard fans, a result that left them 82nd of the 92 League clubs.
Porto, then, should have been an impossible task. The visiting side that lined up for the first leg contained seven of the players who had been in the team beaten 2-1 by Juventus in the previous year’s final, plus a young Paulo Futre. A host of them had helped Portugal to a World Cup qualifying victory over Sweden the week before. Predictably they dominated much of the first half, but the Welsh side grew into the game and Jim Steel’s bullet header gave them a remarkable victory. Just 4,935 had been at the Racecourse ground for the first leg; nearly 40,000 packed into Estádio das Antas in Porto for the return game. In what Steel would later describe as “a bloody hurricane” the hosts raced into a 3-0 lead within 38 minutes, but the Robins’ captain, Jake King, pulled two goals back just before half-time. Futre put the Portuguese back in command with a goal in the second half before Barry Horne, signed from Rhyl in the summer, made it 4-3 in the dying minutes, giving the Welshmen an astonishing victory on away goals. Their reward was a trip to Italy to take on the beaten European Cup finalists of 1983-84, Roma. A 3-0 aggregate defeat meant an honourable exit, but the players had already written themselves into Wrexham, and indeed European, folklore. John Ashdown
3. CSKA Sofia 2-0 Ajax (agg: 2-1), 24/10/1973, European Cup second round
Ajax had been shocked before – not least in 1960 when they were beaten 4-3 by the Norwegian amateurs Fredrikstad – but those defeats came before they had evolved into the European powerhouse of the early 1970s. This came when they were close to the height of their powers. In 1971, ‘72 and ‘73 they had won a hat-trick of European Cups under Rinus Michels and then Istvan Kovacs. Johan Cruyff had departed for Barcelona in the summer of 1973, but this was still the team of Johan Neeskens, Arie Haan, Johnny Rep and Piet Keizer. They had not been beaten in Europe since the defeat to Arsenal in the semi-final of the Fairs Cup in 1969-70. They had won six of the previous eight Eredivise titles.
CSKA by comparison, despite their domestic success (four back-to-back titles from 1969), had never made an impact on the European scene. They’d reached the European Cup semis in 1967 but in the previous year’s European Cup they had been destroyed 6-1 over two legs by the same Ajax side. They’d reached the second round in bizarre circumstances after their second leg with Panathinaikos was replayed after the game had gone to penalties. A Jan Mulder goal gave Ajax a 1-0 victory in the first leg, but that was nullified in Sofia when Dimitar Marashliev scored in the 68th minute. Extra-time was needed. In the 116th minute, Stefan Mikhailov struck to give the Bulgarians a famous victory and effectively end Ajax’s golden era. It was to be 14 years before the once-dominant club won another European title. JA
4. Chelsea 1-1 Atvidaberg (Atvidaberg win on away goals), Cup Winners’ Cup, 2nd round, 1971
Six months previously Chelsea had lifted the trophy by beating Real Madrid in the final, and they began their defence of the Cup Winners’ Cup with a narrow 21-0 aggregate victory over Jeunesse Hautcharage of Luxembourg. So nobody expected them to slip up in the next round against the Swedish part-timers. Even after being held 0-0 in the away leg, Peter Osgood and Co were anticipating a slaughter at Stamford Bridge, as indeed were the Swedes, who, in the words of David Lacey in the Guardian, “threw nine men back in their defence with a fatalism worthy of Bergman”.
Atvidaberg survived the first half but within 10 seconds of the resumption they finally fell behind, Alan Hudson finding the net from 20 yards. John Hollins’ penalty miss a few minutes later was not expected to matter but, amazingly, it did, as in the 68th minute the visitors mounted their attack of the game and the striker Roland Sandberg dashed on to a pass from Lars-Goran Andersson and slid the ball past Peter Bonnetti for an equaliser. Chelsea failed to respond and, indeed, failed to accept their defeat with good grace. “One of the Chelsea players spat at me,” said the forward Ralf Edstrom recently, adding: “They were real pigs. Absolutely! Pigs! A lot of people say that the Englishmen were always fair. And maybe they were – when they were playing each other. Against foreign teams they were dirty all the time.” PD
5. Dinamo Tbilisi 3-0 Liverpool (agg: 4-2), 3/10/1979, European Cup first round
Teams from behind the Iron Curtain were always shrouded in mystery – in previews they were habitually referred to as “the crack Soviet outfit” or “the ruthless Red Army” but no one knew for sure how good they would turn out to be. Would Tbilisi be as nifty as Ferencvaros and Red Star Belgrade had proved when upsetting Liverpool earlier in the decade, albeit before Bob Paisley had elevated the club to a higher level with two European Cup triumphs? No. They would turn out to be better than anything the English champions had ever encountered. Already in the first leg at Anfield, where the home side had prevailed 2-1, Dinamo had shown flashes of a technical and tactical sophistication that perplexed the hosts. In Tibilisi came the full onslaught.
Liverpool barely slept the night before the match – some 200 Dinamo fans having staged a torchlight parade around their hotel at 4am – but mostly it was Dinamo’s rapid passing and jagged running that made them so sluggish. Dinamo made it 1-0 on the night after a moment that should feature permanently in the Match of the Day intro footage: David Kipiani dazzled past Alan Hansen with a piece of trickery that left the acclaimed denouncer of diabolical defending floundering like a drunk in the dark. Ray Clemence diverted the ensuing cross, but only as far as Vladimir Gutsaev, who slammed it into the net. The Georgians’ second arrived in the 75th minute when Georgiy Chilaya collected the ball in his own half, slalomed past three opponents and slipped in Ramaz Shengelia, who casually lifted the ball over Clemence to make it 2-0. Three minutes later came the third after Phil Thompson conceded a penalty and Alexandre Chivadze converted with ease. Hansen has since said this was the best Liverpool team he ever played in. Kevin Keegan’s Hamburg would avenge them in the next round, knocking out Dinamo. PD
6. Aberdeen 3-2 Bayern Munich (agg: 3-2), Cup Winners’ Cup quarter-final, 1983
An up-and-coming manager named Alex Ferguson had already made Aberdeen a force in Scotland but not until this dramatic night did Europe realise that here was a side to be reckoned with. Applauded just for reaching this stage of the tournament, Aberdeen were expected to be dispatched by Bayern, who counted Karl-Heinz Rummenigge and Paul Breitner in their team. After a valiant 0-0 draw in Munich, the Dons fans were dreading the concession of an early goal at Pittodrie and their worst fears were realised when Klaus Augenthaler stepped regally forward to drive the ball into the net in the 10th minute. Neil Simpson equalised before half-time, but soon the Scots were put back in their supposed place, when Hans Pflügler smashed a crisp left-footed volley past Jim Leighton.
Needing two goals to progress, Ferguson introduced two substitutes – John McMaster and John Hewitt. In the 76th minute the former combined with Gordon Strachan to outwit the German defence with a free-kick routine that has since become commonplace at Manchester United, leaving Strachan to cross for Alex McLeish to head an equaliser. One minute later, the Bayern keeper Manfred Müller parried an Eric Black header and Hewitt, with his first touch after five months out with injury, stabbed in a sensational winner. Now all of Europe was aware of something special brewing in Scotland, but neither Waterschei in the semi-final, nor Real Madrid in the final, could concoct a remedy, and Aberdeen completed one of the most astonishing campaigns in European history. PD
MetzBarcelonaLiverpoolAberdeenBayern MunichChelseaEuropean footballPaul DoyleJohn Ashdownguardian.co.uk
