Wasn’t even the greatest comeback that week
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Can’t think of a better one in a CL final.
More a smash and grab ??
Virgin Sport played the extended highlights a few weeks ago. A very poor game, which is how I remember it at the time also. Man Utd were very disjointed and made very few chances from play, due to their strange midfield, playing Beckham in the centre and Giggs on the right. Blonqvist had a better game than Giggs. Bayern Munich were a lot better than them but needed a better centre forward than Jancker. I never really saw Jancker have a great game. United needed set pieces to win it. I respect them, they had unreal mental strength, but they got very lucky. Basler was comfortably the best player on the pitch.
Virgin Sport also showed Juventus vs Man Utd in the semis and it was like watching a different sport from today. It was more like basketball nearly, both defences just ran through each other like they weren’t there.
On Tuesday nights RTE show highlights of 3 classic champions league games . It is a decent show
30 years ago
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It was a very weak era for football
Ah this thread is magnificent
It’s very hard to imagine players like Jancker or Blonqvist getting near a CL final today, even if Blonqvist didn’t play too badly. They’d make Jordan Henderson look world-class in comparison.
I dont know if there’s more or less talent available today but it wasnt quite as concentrated in a few clubs back then. That was just before the era of the super-team. Nobody had ever heard of squad depth or squad rotation until Ferguson started talking about it around the time he won the treble.
When I looked up the 1961 Tottenham double team a while back they only used about 15 or 16 players all season.
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Eric Dier played in a CL final last year in fairness.
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If you look back at 90s football, all teams were very much domestic players with one or two foreign talents in the side.
Was there a rule that you could only have 3 foreigners in your matchday squad or something?
I think football needs to reinforce that rule for the good of the game.
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Ever been there? Horrible place.
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No , was at Yad Vashem when living in Israel , moving, met a few survivors - normal ppl unlike the bolloxes in Israel ATM
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Bringing my teen , visited a few cemeteries in eastern Europe still can’t grasp fully the amount of ppl killed during ww2, coming from a small isle- Russians to me suffered the most
Harambe the gorilla was shot dead in Cincinnati zoo due to a careless human not controlling their child. Keep you children on leashes people.
35 years ago today, Liverpool fans murdered 39 innocent people who were attending a football match.
Never forget.
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The memory of the cursed night: on May 29, 1985 the massacre of fans in the Belgian stadium before the Juventus-Liverpool final
The sky was a beautiful orange red, and in the air the first warmth of May roamed, first for Brussels, one of those places where spring sparkles for a long time and knows how to freeze the skin. We went to the stadium like a party. The horizon just behind that curve was also red, in turn scarlet due to the shirts of the Liverpool fans, the “reds”. Many, red also had faces, in the absolute contrast between the milky skin of the British (not infrequently they also have red hair, and mustaches), but more the result of alcohol, of endless drinking.
The bivouac around the Grand Place had lasted a couple of days, and the morning of the game extended into the city like a rave party. The British were lying on the stones paving one of the most beautiful squares in the world and drinking seated, drinking lying down, using packs of cans as cushions, burping in the faces of passersby. They yelled, threw glass, pissed on the walls. At one point, a crystal centerpiece, one of those objects that adorn grandmothers’ living rooms, flew from an elegant window and landed half a meter away from us. An old, exasperated Belgian lady must have thrown it.
At six in the evening the stadium was still fairly quiet. Juve fans had arrived in order, little was seen during the day. Most had reached Brussels on last-minute charter flights, the cheapest. Families, friends, and then the elderly and children also went to the stadium. At that time, a Champions Cup final was still a festive collective rite: it would remain for another hour, and then never again.
Before the sun went down, in the rays of a long lasting sunset that was now a dark red, blood red, the curve to the left began to sway. The British were moving like a barbaric migration. They pushed and sang. From the grandstand, however, it seemed only a slightly more lively mass movement, a choreography. We looked better: something was wrong. It was as if the people dressed in red, moving towards the adjacent sector, the notorious “Z”, divided only by a kind of chicken coop net, merged with the people dressed in black and white. A crush, but still vague. To the naked eye it was not clear. A colleague sitting next to us had binoculars. "But where are they going? Are they crazy? 'He asked.
It was like watching a documentary about tsunamis. The human wave rose and fell on what it found in its path, yet the exact perception of the drama that was taking place was not immediate. We understood better when people invaded the camp. The luckier one had managed not to be overwhelmed. Arriving on the lawn was like reaching salvation after being closed in a demijohn, and finally having blown the cap. Many had failed, but it was still unknown.
“There are wounded,” said someone. And immediately we ran out, going out into the open space in front of the tribune where the first bodies were taking. And then we saw, and understood. There were people stretched out, others carried on barriers used as makeshift stretchers. There were gendarmes on horseback going mad, twirling their truncheons. We turned to a man who was lying on his back and already had wide eyes. He had that man with a huge, naked belly. Another man, surely a doctor, tried to revive him and at some point, out of desperation, he practiced a tracheotomy. It didn’t help. The man with the bare belly was already dead.
We went up to the stands again to phone the newspaper. At that time cell phones did not exist. There was only a few landlines with disk machines. Some Italians approached and passed us cards with telephone numbers: “Please call our house and say we are alive.”
Everyone then had to play it. Gaetano Scirea’s voice still resounds in the air as he says “stay calm, let’s play for you”. Meanwhile, outside, the dead were being carried away, and in the end they counted 39. There was a carpet of black and white scarves and shirts, and shoes, many, even of a child. It was all absurd, perhaps necessary. Not playing, probably, the budget would have become even more atrocious. Juventus won thanks to a penalty won by Boniek, outside the area, and transformed by Platini. The Bianconeri withdrew the Cup and celebrated, they did it for their people and for a nervous outburst. “But I’m still ashamed,” Tardelli would later say.
A sentence is repeated, for exactly thirty-five years: that evening football lost its innocence. Maybe. Or perhaps, instead, he became only realistic, taking note of the ferocity that sometimes dominates the masses, and the unfortunate amateurism that can guide the hand of authority. It was insipidity rather than fatality, and murderous lightness: the police and the Belgian government had understood nothing. Nobody lost innocence that evening because he never had it. If not those poor fans, those people waiting for a return that would never have happened.
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