european football nights

​My wife and I have just completed a road trip that covered the length and breadth of the country. Yesterday evening, we passed Droitwich on our way home as I reflected on the recent and not-so-recent past.

We’ve returned to all the pay-to-view hype about this week’s Group Stage of the UEFA Champions League, with interest rates taking centre stage once more.

Arsenal face Athletic Club from Bilbao in the first competitive match between the two clubs. All eyes will be on how many injuries Arsenal can sustain overseas this time, putting paid to yet another Premier League campaign, before going out in the knockout rounds.

Tottenham take on another Spanish club - Villarreal - after winning one of the dullest European finals in recent history. Obviously, they will progress nicely until facing a smaller club that they are bound to beat…

Chelsea are at Bayern Munich in a repeat of the 2012 Final. Will Harry Kane come back to haunt them or remember, at the last moment, that he isn’t supposed to win anything other than a title in a local, supposedly inferior league?

Liverpool face yet another Spanish side, but slightly less athletic – Atlético Madrid – in a repeat of the pre-Covid match that had absolutely no effect on contamination rates in the city, honest.

Manchester City face an expat team from Italy, led by Antonio Conte, who may well have self-combusted before kick-off, and Newcastle will be watching Barcelona run rings around them, as Isak did all summer.

It all sounds great, doesn’t it? I really liked the new format of the competition last season and wish each of our football teams all the best out there. And yet, I can’t help thinking that there is just so much of it. So many teams and so many matches, when not that long ago, you had to become champions of your country to compete at the highest level.

I remember Celtic becoming the first British team to win the European Cup in 1967, and Manchester United the first from England to lift the trophy on that unforgettable night at Wembley a year later.

I understand that things have to move on, and it’s great that Champions League, Europa League and Conference League qualifying keep our own Premier League interesting until Liverpool or Manchester City eventually win it. More teams mean more opportunities and many more bonuses for the bean counters at UEFA.

However, all of this makes it harder to single out any particular European match for greatness these days. So many provide great entertainment, but are they really special in the way that a European football night used to be?

‘Sportsnight with Coleman’ would give us suitably grainy highlights of the big matches, but it was to the radio that I would turn, full of excitement and anticipation, to listen to radio commentaries from the likes of Maurice Edelston (who had played for Great Britain in the football tournament at the 1936 Olympic Games) alongside the old school charm of Peter Jones.

My mother had donated me our big old black wireless from the kitchen, complete with valves that needed warming up for what seemed like a lifetime (and certainly longer than any pre-match routines), when the Light Programme was replaced by Radio 1 and Radio 2 in 1967, and she upgraded to a shiny, silver transistor radio.

Radio 2 was transmitted on the long wave signal on 200 kHz / 1500 metres from Droitwich. Although occasionally venturing right and left, tuning into Eastern European programmes or those from France and Spain, my radio dial remained pretty much fixed on the place just a few miles away from where I now live in Worcestershire.

Just as I still enjoy football commentaries on Radio 5 Live these days, I was lost as a child in the far-off worlds of European football. The places we visited together then, sharing such memorable experiences, may not seem so far away now, but the memories live on as backdrops to where I was and what I was doing at the time.

We were visiting my aunt in Penzance in 1971 when Peter Osgood and John Dempsey scored in the replay of the UEFA European Cup Winners’ Cup Final against Real Madrid to secure Chelsea’s first European trophy. UEFA had sanctioned penalty shootouts for the competition that season, but not yet to decide the outcome of a final!

Four years later, I was on a school exchange trip in Aumale in Northern France, listening to Leeds United beat Barcelona in the semi-final of that year’s European Cup, shouting out loud when Allan Clarke scored the second goal, also in a 2.1 win. It was lost in translation as the family I was staying with were watching their local heroes, St Etienne, battling it out with Bayern Munich on the TV.

In 1980, a group of us sat around a kitchen table in a student flat in Leeds listening to Arsenal becoming the first English team to beat Juventus at their Stadio Communale ground in Turin. A 1.1 draw in the first leg of this Cup Winners’ Cup semi-final meant that the away goal favoured the Italians before 18-year-old Paul Vaessen scored for the Gunners just two minutes from the end to put Arsenal through to the final, and over 66,000 heading disappointedly to the exits.

Two years later, as I was about to begin a postgraduate degree in information science in Sheffield – in a pre-Google world – Peter Withe proved that a ball bouncing off part of the leg other than the foot could still be effective as he scored the only goal for Aston Villa as they beat Bayern Munich to win another European Cup for the British.

I’ve revisited many similar moments in my Football History series of books, recalling key events that make up the stories of not just football clubs, but our own stories too.

These were special nights, described eloquently by football fans with microphones, and shared with me and so many others as their messages came through loud and clear throughout the land. They became diary entries in football history, much more than just fixtures in a seemingly ever-expanding list.

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