UEFA CUP FIRST ROUND, SEPTEMBER 1994

BLACKBURN 0 TRELLEBORG 1 & TRELLEBORG 2 BLACKBURN 2

■ LET me step away from the FA Cup for a moment, because if we’re talking losing to minnows, I have to discuss Blackburn, the UEFA Cup and 1994. What made this defeat doubly worse was the fact we had two bites at it. In the same season we went on to win the Premier League, Blackburn exited Europe to Swedish part-timers Trelleborg. We lost the first leg 1-0 at Ewood Park and that was bad.

Alan Shearer and I were up front and Tom Prahl, the Trelleborg coach who was also a teacher, said afterwards: ‘We’d have been satisfied to head home with a 2-0 defeat.’ Trelleborg’s players were promised 200 Swedish crowns at half-time if they could score — the equivalent of £20 — and they earned it. A chap called Fredrik Sandell handed them the 1-0 win in the 71st minute. His day job was to supply ink to newspapers. You can imagine the headlines weren’t too kind to us after this. We were utterly embarrassed. Trelleborg had come through qualifying to make it into the first round and, as if to make us feel worse, Prahl also admitted: ‘We’re not even among the top five or six teams in Sweden.’ We figured we’d sort it out in the second leg. We didn’t.

We drew 2-2 in Sweden to this assortment of butchers, bankers, salesmen and a ratcatcher. I scored, then an accountant called Joachim Karlsson equalised. Shearer scored, then Karlsson equalised again! They were even down to 10 men! The headline in the Lancashire Evening Telegraph was: ‘Trell-ible.’ No arguing with that. Trelleborg went through, and well done to them. This haunted me, mind — Henrik Larsson enjoyed reminding me of it when we played together at Celtic. As the cliché goes, at least Blackburn got to concentrate on the Premier League… and we can have no regrets in that competition.