Share this feature:
It's a knockout
Hopefully this triggers memories of your own, when mastery met mayhem and we felt spellbound by the random nature of what happened next
WORDS Graham Hunter
Cover Stories
You’ve chosen a match to watch – it could be kids on a muddy pitch at the local ‘rec’, or a semi-pro team when your own beloved club is playing away from home. Perhaps you’ve got your feet up in front of the TV at home, or you’re craning your neck to watch down the pub. If you’re really lucky, you might even be a face in the crowd at a major foreign stadium you’ve always wanted to visit. Wherever.
Within a couple of minutes, there’s flair, a goal chance, intensity, and your brain is sending you a tidal wave of endorphins as a phrase echoes around your head: “Chose a good one here… This is going to be fun!”
Metaphorically, that’s exactly how it has been across the last 69 years since the Champions League, launched as the European Cup, staged its first knockout match: a roller-coaster 3-3 draw between Sporting CP and Partizan in which the Lisbon hosts twice pulled back from a goal down, despite João Golaz’s 50th-minute red card. Adding to the manic energy of the occasion, the visitors were effectively down to ten as well, Branko Zebec having suffered an early injury in an era before substitutes.
The template had been set. From the word go, this effervescent, irrepressible tournament showed how continental knockout football was going to grip our emotions in perpetuity. The European Cup had been born, taken baby steps, and what those 30,000 pioneering fans discovered that day at the Estádio Nacional, the rest of us would eventually learn for ourselves: that these continental jousts are addictive, impassioned, unpredictable and simply wonderful.
Within weeks, AC Milan had lost 4-3 to Saarbrücken at the San Siro, before winning 4-1 away to progress – the long tradition of seesaw ties had begun. Even inaugural European Cup winners Real Madrid had to endure their 4-0 lead in the quarter-finals being nail-bitingly eroded in Belgrade, where Partizan’s 3-0 win left them just one goal shy of taking the tie to a third, deciding match.
From the outset, the knockout ties in Europe’s ‘I’ll show you who’s best’ tournament looked and felt like they were directed by Alfred Hitchcock. But there’s a pretty fair chance most of you weren’t born back then, and this isn’t a chronological history of the European Cup – simply a love letter to some of the most impactful ties this competition has produced. Moments seared in my mind which, one way or another, forever sealed my adoration for continental football and its unofficial mantra: ‘Me or you… only one of us gets through.’
And there, precisely, lies the guarantee that, just as there always has been, there always will be searing excitement and drama. Just think how much the game has changed. Originally, the trophy hopefuls knew the minimum about one another. Every opposition team sheet read like an exotic foreign menu, every game was a voyage of discovery – and surprises were par for the course. Nowadays, the mystery is gone, swept away by the homogenisation of knowledge, analysis tools, fitness levels and coaching strategies. But what abides is the drive and desire for glory, for supremacy, for the financial rewards but, inarguably, for a place in history. It’s a basic human instinct: ‘I will not be conquered… Indeed, I will conquer you!’
Hopefully, reading this will send you off on reminiscences of your own – nights when your pulse raced, when your brain could barely compute what your eyes were telling you: when mastery met mayhem and we, the spectators, felt spellbound by the random nature of what happened next.
Although my idol was always Johan Cruyff, fuelled by the rarity of live football on television when his Ajax side won a European Cup hat-trick between 1971 and 1973, the first pre-final knockout tie I remember watching (on TV, aged 11) was Derby County vs Real Madrid in October 1975.
The Rams were outsiders, shock English champions, but managed by a Scottish great, Dave MacKay, and starring two of his countrymen – Archie Gemmill and Bruce Rioch. Good enough for me. Madrid? Well, even then, Real Madrid were the byword for European glamour, irrespective of Ajax and Bayern having become dominant forces.
Back then, no one had wall-to-wall live football, there was no internet, and forget about access to ‘best of’ clips at the drop of a hat. European nights shown in brief highlights on midweek free-to-air TV were like gold dust. This one didn’t disappoint.
Los Blancos… that was Derby because they were at home, wearing white shirts, a big embroidered ram where the club badge goes. More confusingly still, Madrid were in royal blue – looking just like the Chelsea side which had defeated them in the 1971 Cup Winners’ Cup final. The Baseball Ground, for once that night, boasted a pristine, green-baize playing surface. Everything seemed back to front. Including the result.
Hopefully this triggers memories of your own, when mastery met mayhem and we felt spellbound by the random nature of what happened next
Mbappe scores for Monaco
Across my career, I’ve had the wonderful good fortune to see dozens of European Cup and Champions League matches. Finals and semi-finals usually take care of themselves in terms of drama, heroism and ‘cometh the hour’ moments.
But the stories which write themselves earlier in the competition can likewise yield blistering tension, surprise, revenge motifs and… damn it, fun. A few stand out, including both legs of the quarter-final between Manchester United and Inter in 1998/99, the season Sir Alex clinched the first of his two titles.
Here were two giants of European football and so, undeniably, the fact that they hadn’t won this trophy for 31 and 34 years respectively was the major narrative… but only just. What the world was gazing in on, voyeuristically, was the first collision between David Beckham and Diego ‘El Cholo’ Simeone since the United midfielder’s red card the previous summer, when Argentina had knocked England out of the World Cup.
The two matches were bruising, incessant, bursting with id, ego and superego. Beckham excelled, Simeone exited, and the atmospheres at Old Trafford and the San Siro were seismic. Glorious.
AC Milan won’t feel any gratitude in joining this list, but their tie with Deportivo La Coruña in spring 2004 might, by a whisker, be my favourite. At the San Siro (that evocative name again…), Depor were terrific, undaunted, daring and led 1-0. Carlo Ancelotti’s reigning European champions did that thing which great clubs do – notching four imperious goals in a stunning eight-minute storm from Kaká (two), Andriy Shevchenko and Andrea Pirlo.
That, thought everyone except Depor coach Javier Irureta, was that. Before heading home from Milan, the Basque manager observed: “Miracles often happen, things you might not rationally expect.” How right he was.
Let me try to convince you that being present at the Estadio Riazor, a literal hop and a skip from the Atlantic Ocean, on the night of 7 April 2004 was epic, life-enhancing. The scrappy underdogs chased the regal European title holders around that pitch and became ‘best in show’.
They left majestic players like Cafu, Paolo Maldini, Alessandro Nesta and Clarence Seedorf staring at each other with ‘what the hell’s going on here?’ expressions as Irureta’s provincial team won 4-0, chasing a fourth goal long, long after the 3-0 half-time scoreline already had them qualified on away goals. They were simply rampant.
That stadium shook, I really mean it: the noise, the local pride, the pungent fact that, sometimes, unlike in boxing, a good little one beats a good big one.
Arsène Wenger, author of a few five-star knockout nights of his own, used to say, “Every man thinks he has the prettiest wife at home.” It’s a canny quip, made to acknowledge that subjectivity is an inescapable human trait. So, this is where I surrender. Monaco, Manchester City, Benfica, Valencia, Chelsea, Hamburg, Bayer Leverkusen, Feyenoord… Name whoever, you will all have your favourite knockout tie and most-treasured era.
Maybe you were at that first match in Lisbon in 1955, or the Baseball Ground, or the Bernabéu… What unifies us is that we are suckers for the sucker punch. We love that no matter how many games we watch, no matter the apparent ‘obvious’ winner or how many minutes are left on the clock, Champions League knockout ties perpetually offer us magic, magnificence and a ‘maybe, who knows?’ element. And that will never go out of fashion.
Within a couple of minutes, there’s flair, a goal chance, intensity, and your brain is sending you a tidal wave of endorphins as a phrase echoes around your head: “Chose a good one here… This is going to be fun!”
Metaphorically, that’s exactly how it has been across the last 69 years since the Champions League, launched as the European Cup, staged its first knockout match: a roller-coaster 3-3 draw between Sporting CP and Partizan in which the Lisbon hosts twice pulled back from a goal down, despite João Golaz’s 50th-minute red card. Adding to the manic energy of the occasion, the visitors were effectively down to ten as well, Branko Zebec having suffered an early injury in an era before substitutes.
The template had been set. From the word go, this effervescent, irrepressible tournament showed how continental knockout football was going to grip our emotions in perpetuity. The European Cup had been born, taken baby steps, and what those 30,000 pioneering fans discovered that day at the Estádio Nacional, the rest of us would eventually learn for ourselves: that these continental jousts are addictive, impassioned, unpredictable and simply wonderful.
Within weeks, AC Milan had lost 4-3 to Saarbrücken at the San Siro, before winning 4-1 away to progress – the long tradition of seesaw ties had begun. Even inaugural European Cup winners Real Madrid had to endure their 4-0 lead in the quarter-finals being nail-bitingly eroded in Belgrade, where Partizan’s 3-0 win left them just one goal shy of taking the tie to a third, deciding match.
From the outset, the knockout ties in Europe’s ‘I’ll show you who’s best’ tournament looked and felt like they were directed by Alfred Hitchcock. But there’s a pretty fair chance most of you weren’t born back then, and this isn’t a chronological history of the European Cup – simply a love letter to some of the most impactful ties this competition has produced. Moments seared in my mind which, one way or another, forever sealed my adoration for continental football and its unofficial mantra: ‘Me or you… only one of us gets through.’
And there, precisely, lies the guarantee that, just as there always has been, there always will be searing excitement and drama. Just think how much the game has changed. Originally, the trophy hopefuls knew the minimum about one another. Every opposition team sheet read like an exotic foreign menu, every game was a voyage of discovery – and surprises were par for the course. Nowadays, the mystery is gone, swept away by the homogenisation of knowledge, analysis tools, fitness levels and coaching strategies. But what abides is the drive and desire for glory, for supremacy, for the financial rewards but, inarguably, for a place in history. It’s a basic human instinct: ‘I will not be conquered… Indeed, I will conquer you!’
Hopefully, reading this will send you off on reminiscences of your own – nights when your pulse raced, when your brain could barely compute what your eyes were telling you: when mastery met mayhem and we, the spectators, felt spellbound by the random nature of what happened next.
Although my idol was always Johan Cruyff, fuelled by the rarity of live football on television when his Ajax side won a European Cup hat-trick between 1971 and 1973, the first pre-final knockout tie I remember watching (on TV, aged 11) was Derby County vs Real Madrid in October 1975.
The Rams were outsiders, shock English champions, but managed by a Scottish great, Dave MacKay, and starring two of his countrymen – Archie Gemmill and Bruce Rioch. Good enough for me. Madrid? Well, even then, Real Madrid were the byword for European glamour, irrespective of Ajax and Bayern having become dominant forces.
Back then, no one had wall-to-wall live football, there was no internet, and forget about access to ‘best of’ clips at the drop of a hat. European nights shown in brief highlights on midweek free-to-air TV were like gold dust. This one didn’t disappoint.
Los Blancos… that was Derby because they were at home, wearing white shirts, a big embroidered ram where the club badge goes. More confusingly still, Madrid were in royal blue – looking just like the Chelsea side which had defeated them in the 1971 Cup Winners’ Cup final. The Baseball Ground, for once that night, boasted a pristine, green-baize playing surface. Everything seemed back to front. Including the result.
Read the full story
Sign up now to get access to this and every premium feature on Champions Journal. You will also get access to member-only competitions and offers. And you get all of that completely free!
Hopefully this triggers memories of your own, when mastery met mayhem and we felt spellbound by the random nature of what happened next
Mbappe scores for Monaco
Across my career, I’ve had the wonderful good fortune to see dozens of European Cup and Champions League matches. Finals and semi-finals usually take care of themselves in terms of drama, heroism and ‘cometh the hour’ moments.
But the stories which write themselves earlier in the competition can likewise yield blistering tension, surprise, revenge motifs and… damn it, fun. A few stand out, including both legs of the quarter-final between Manchester United and Inter in 1998/99, the season Sir Alex clinched the first of his two titles.
Here were two giants of European football and so, undeniably, the fact that they hadn’t won this trophy for 31 and 34 years respectively was the major narrative… but only just. What the world was gazing in on, voyeuristically, was the first collision between David Beckham and Diego ‘El Cholo’ Simeone since the United midfielder’s red card the previous summer, when Argentina had knocked England out of the World Cup.
The two matches were bruising, incessant, bursting with id, ego and superego. Beckham excelled, Simeone exited, and the atmospheres at Old Trafford and the San Siro were seismic. Glorious.
AC Milan won’t feel any gratitude in joining this list, but their tie with Deportivo La Coruña in spring 2004 might, by a whisker, be my favourite. At the San Siro (that evocative name again…), Depor were terrific, undaunted, daring and led 1-0. Carlo Ancelotti’s reigning European champions did that thing which great clubs do – notching four imperious goals in a stunning eight-minute storm from Kaká (two), Andriy Shevchenko and Andrea Pirlo.
That, thought everyone except Depor coach Javier Irureta, was that. Before heading home from Milan, the Basque manager observed: “Miracles often happen, things you might not rationally expect.” How right he was.
Let me try to convince you that being present at the Estadio Riazor, a literal hop and a skip from the Atlantic Ocean, on the night of 7 April 2004 was epic, life-enhancing. The scrappy underdogs chased the regal European title holders around that pitch and became ‘best in show’.
They left majestic players like Cafu, Paolo Maldini, Alessandro Nesta and Clarence Seedorf staring at each other with ‘what the hell’s going on here?’ expressions as Irureta’s provincial team won 4-0, chasing a fourth goal long, long after the 3-0 half-time scoreline already had them qualified on away goals. They were simply rampant.
That stadium shook, I really mean it: the noise, the local pride, the pungent fact that, sometimes, unlike in boxing, a good little one beats a good big one.
Arsène Wenger, author of a few five-star knockout nights of his own, used to say, “Every man thinks he has the prettiest wife at home.” It’s a canny quip, made to acknowledge that subjectivity is an inescapable human trait. So, this is where I surrender. Monaco, Manchester City, Benfica, Valencia, Chelsea, Hamburg, Bayer Leverkusen, Feyenoord… Name whoever, you will all have your favourite knockout tie and most-treasured era.
Maybe you were at that first match in Lisbon in 1955, or the Baseball Ground, or the Bernabéu… What unifies us is that we are suckers for the sucker punch. We love that no matter how many games we watch, no matter the apparent ‘obvious’ winner or how many minutes are left on the clock, Champions League knockout ties perpetually offer us magic, magnificence and a ‘maybe, who knows?’ element. And that will never go out of fashion.
Within a couple of minutes, there’s flair, a goal chance, intensity, and your brain is sending you a tidal wave of endorphins as a phrase echoes around your head: “Chose a good one here… This is going to be fun!”
Metaphorically, that’s exactly how it has been across the last 69 years since the Champions League, launched as the European Cup, staged its first knockout match: a roller-coaster 3-3 draw between Sporting CP and Partizan in which the Lisbon hosts twice pulled back from a goal down, despite João Golaz’s 50th-minute red card. Adding to the manic energy of the occasion, the visitors were effectively down to ten as well, Branko Zebec having suffered an early injury in an era before substitutes.
The template had been set. From the word go, this effervescent, irrepressible tournament showed how continental knockout football was going to grip our emotions in perpetuity. The European Cup had been born, taken baby steps, and what those 30,000 pioneering fans discovered that day at the Estádio Nacional, the rest of us would eventually learn for ourselves: that these continental jousts are addictive, impassioned, unpredictable and simply wonderful.
Within weeks, AC Milan had lost 4-3 to Saarbrücken at the San Siro, before winning 4-1 away to progress – the long tradition of seesaw ties had begun. Even inaugural European Cup winners Real Madrid had to endure their 4-0 lead in the quarter-finals being nail-bitingly eroded in Belgrade, where Partizan’s 3-0 win left them just one goal shy of taking the tie to a third, deciding match.
From the outset, the knockout ties in Europe’s ‘I’ll show you who’s best’ tournament looked and felt like they were directed by Alfred Hitchcock. But there’s a pretty fair chance most of you weren’t born back then, and this isn’t a chronological history of the European Cup – simply a love letter to some of the most impactful ties this competition has produced. Moments seared in my mind which, one way or another, forever sealed my adoration for continental football and its unofficial mantra: ‘Me or you… only one of us gets through.’
And there, precisely, lies the guarantee that, just as there always has been, there always will be searing excitement and drama. Just think how much the game has changed. Originally, the trophy hopefuls knew the minimum about one another. Every opposition team sheet read like an exotic foreign menu, every game was a voyage of discovery – and surprises were par for the course. Nowadays, the mystery is gone, swept away by the homogenisation of knowledge, analysis tools, fitness levels and coaching strategies. But what abides is the drive and desire for glory, for supremacy, for the financial rewards but, inarguably, for a place in history. It’s a basic human instinct: ‘I will not be conquered… Indeed, I will conquer you!’
Hopefully, reading this will send you off on reminiscences of your own – nights when your pulse raced, when your brain could barely compute what your eyes were telling you: when mastery met mayhem and we, the spectators, felt spellbound by the random nature of what happened next.
Although my idol was always Johan Cruyff, fuelled by the rarity of live football on television when his Ajax side won a European Cup hat-trick between 1971 and 1973, the first pre-final knockout tie I remember watching (on TV, aged 11) was Derby County vs Real Madrid in October 1975.
The Rams were outsiders, shock English champions, but managed by a Scottish great, Dave MacKay, and starring two of his countrymen – Archie Gemmill and Bruce Rioch. Good enough for me. Madrid? Well, even then, Real Madrid were the byword for European glamour, irrespective of Ajax and Bayern having become dominant forces.
Back then, no one had wall-to-wall live football, there was no internet, and forget about access to ‘best of’ clips at the drop of a hat. European nights shown in brief highlights on midweek free-to-air TV were like gold dust. This one didn’t disappoint.
Los Blancos… that was Derby because they were at home, wearing white shirts, a big embroidered ram where the club badge goes. More confusingly still, Madrid were in royal blue – looking just like the Chelsea side which had defeated them in the 1971 Cup Winners’ Cup final. The Baseball Ground, for once that night, boasted a pristine, green-baize playing surface. Everything seemed back to front. Including the result.
Hopefully this triggers memories of your own, when mastery met mayhem and we felt spellbound by the random nature of what happened next
Mbappe scores for Monaco
Across my career, I’ve had the wonderful good fortune to see dozens of European Cup and Champions League matches. Finals and semi-finals usually take care of themselves in terms of drama, heroism and ‘cometh the hour’ moments.
But the stories which write themselves earlier in the competition can likewise yield blistering tension, surprise, revenge motifs and… damn it, fun. A few stand out, including both legs of the quarter-final between Manchester United and Inter in 1998/99, the season Sir Alex clinched the first of his two titles.
Here were two giants of European football and so, undeniably, the fact that they hadn’t won this trophy for 31 and 34 years respectively was the major narrative… but only just. What the world was gazing in on, voyeuristically, was the first collision between David Beckham and Diego ‘El Cholo’ Simeone since the United midfielder’s red card the previous summer, when Argentina had knocked England out of the World Cup.
The two matches were bruising, incessant, bursting with id, ego and superego. Beckham excelled, Simeone exited, and the atmospheres at Old Trafford and the San Siro were seismic. Glorious.
AC Milan won’t feel any gratitude in joining this list, but their tie with Deportivo La Coruña in spring 2004 might, by a whisker, be my favourite. At the San Siro (that evocative name again…), Depor were terrific, undaunted, daring and led 1-0. Carlo Ancelotti’s reigning European champions did that thing which great clubs do – notching four imperious goals in a stunning eight-minute storm from Kaká (two), Andriy Shevchenko and Andrea Pirlo.
That, thought everyone except Depor coach Javier Irureta, was that. Before heading home from Milan, the Basque manager observed: “Miracles often happen, things you might not rationally expect.” How right he was.
Let me try to convince you that being present at the Estadio Riazor, a literal hop and a skip from the Atlantic Ocean, on the night of 7 April 2004 was epic, life-enhancing. The scrappy underdogs chased the regal European title holders around that pitch and became ‘best in show’.
They left majestic players like Cafu, Paolo Maldini, Alessandro Nesta and Clarence Seedorf staring at each other with ‘what the hell’s going on here?’ expressions as Irureta’s provincial team won 4-0, chasing a fourth goal long, long after the 3-0 half-time scoreline already had them qualified on away goals. They were simply rampant.
That stadium shook, I really mean it: the noise, the local pride, the pungent fact that, sometimes, unlike in boxing, a good little one beats a good big one.
Arsène Wenger, author of a few five-star knockout nights of his own, used to say, “Every man thinks he has the prettiest wife at home.” It’s a canny quip, made to acknowledge that subjectivity is an inescapable human trait. So, this is where I surrender. Monaco, Manchester City, Benfica, Valencia, Chelsea, Hamburg, Bayer Leverkusen, Feyenoord… Name whoever, you will all have your favourite knockout tie and most-treasured era.
Maybe you were at that first match in Lisbon in 1955, or the Baseball Ground, or the Bernabéu… What unifies us is that we are suckers for the sucker punch. We love that no matter how many games we watch, no matter the apparent ‘obvious’ winner or how many minutes are left on the clock, Champions League knockout ties perpetually offer us magic, magnificence and a ‘maybe, who knows?’ element. And that will never go out of fashion.
