UK Edition
Remembering the first all-English European final: 'We were looking for a great European name. Instead it was Wolves v Tottenham'
On the first occasion two English clubs played each other in a European final, it might have been thought that a moment of history would have been celebrated. Wolves were playing Tottenham in the final of the 1972 Uefa Cup and the least we might have imagined is for beacons to be lit atop every hillside from Land’s End to Carlisle as parliament declared a week long public holiday to celebrate. It wasn’t quite like that. Steve Perryman, then a young Tottenham midfielder, remembers a very different sense in the Spurs dressing room. It was, he recalls, as if the air had been let out of a balloon.
“No disrespect, but once we made the final we were looking for a great European name,” he says. “Wolves played Ferencvaros in their semi and when we got back to our dressing room after ours, we were definitely looking forward to playing them, a proper European side. Instead it was Wolves v Tottenham. Not quite the same shine.”
And if it might be thought Perryman’s dismissal was born of metropolitan snobbery, the feeling in the Black Country was no more positive.
“Oh God yes, we were disappointed,” says John Richards, the Wolves forward. “Total anti-climax. There we were in a European final and it was just another English team, who we play year in year out. Same old same old. It felt in the run up to it almost like a postponed game slotted in at end of the season.”
1971-72 was the first time the Uefa Cup was staged, its format expanded from the old Fairs Cup to take in more of those clubs who had finished just behind the leaders in their domestic league. The previous year, Spurs and Wolves had finished on equal points in the First Division, with Tottenham placed third on goal average. With many more teams involved in the newly minted competition than had been in its previous incarnation there was a long route to the final. For Richards it was the start of a nine-month adventure.
“I was only 20 and I’d never actually been abroad before,” he admits. “So it was fabulous going to places I'd never even knew of. We went to East Germany, behind the Iron Curtain, played Carl Zeiss Jena in mid-winter, I scored the winner on a snow-covered pitch, with armed soldiers round perimeter of pitch: wow that was the kind of experience you can’t buy.”
Spurs too travelled far and wide in their progress to the final, including Romania. But it was in Italy that both campaigns were expected to run aground. Wolves played Juventus in the quarter final, Spurs faced Milan in the semi.
“We drew in Turin in the first leg, which was a real feather in our caps, it gave us lot of belief,” recalls Richards. “To be honest, I think we unnerved them. We didn’t change our style, we played me and Derek Dougan up front and just went for it. I think they were expecting us to be a bit more cagey.” At Spurs too, Perryman suggests the then manager Bill Nicholson had no particular plan worked out for European games.
“Foreign teams in that era had a much more tactical game,” he says. “It was probably Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest team at the end of the decade that first changed the English approach, made it more of a defensive, counter-attacking one. I remember Bill Nick saying to us: just do what you always do.” And doing what he always did, Perryman enjoyed every moment along the path to the final.
“In Milan I marked Gianni Rivera,” he says of the Italian national team captain who twice won the European Cup before latterly turning to politics. “Every leg, you were logging up experiences to dip into in later life. Pure cream, you’d have been a fool not to take it all in.”
The final, though, was very different. Played over two legs, it was scheduled as the first division season was still reaching its conclusion. As for build-up, there was little of the anticipation back then that is being engendered by this week’s all-English European clashes. There were no newspaper supplements, television documentaries or lengthy media days.
“We had a league game on the Saturday, then played the final midweek, it was a real afterthought,” says Richards. “There was much more interest back then in FA Cup final. To be honest, it must have been televised, but I can’t recall seeing footage of it anywhere.”
Despite the lack of build-up, Molineux was packed and raucous for the first leg. Tottenham emerged with a vital aggregate lead thanks to a superb winner from Martin Chivers. But it was a victory Perryman recalls produced a dangerous complacency in the return at White Hart Lane.
“Most of the two leg games I’ve been involved in, if you win the first leg you don’t win the tie,” he says. “We couldn’t help but think we’d already done enough. We didn’t perform as well at home as at Wolves. Bill Nick was quick to make the case they deserved to win on the night.”
But they didn’t; Tottenham were victorious across the two legs. It was a victory Perryman hopes will serve as an omen for Saturday’s Champions League final between Spurs and Liverpool.
“The last step is always the hardest,” he says. “But this is such an important match for both managers; one of them is going to win their first trophy with the club. After promising so much that could be vital to where they go from here.”
For Richards, it is the team that fails this week who will have his sympathies. While Perryman was involved in another Uefa Cup win a dozen years later, Richards’ European record never again stretched beyond the first round. Forty seven years on, the pain of missed opportunity still lingers.
“The old cliché is it hurts more to lose in a semi, but I tell you I lost three of them and it is nothing like as painful,” he says. “Losing the final, it’s still with me the disappointment. Yeah, all right I got a little silver medal. But actually it was so flimsy it looked like one of those tokens you got at petrol stations at the time. To be honest, I’m not sure why I kept it.”