MAGICIANS of MADRID
60 years ago in Glasgow, the Spanish aristocrats of Real gave birth to the beautiful game with a devastating demolition of Eintracht Frankfurt. It was the night Scotland fell in love with the ...
FOR Glaswegian schoolboys in the spring of 1960, they were names which would slip effortlessly off the tongue in the way no algebraic formula or Shakespearean soliloquy ever could.
Dominguez, Marquitos, Pachin, Vidal, Santamaria, Zarraga, Canario, Del Sol, Di Stefano, Puskas and Gento. Perhaps still the greatest club side ever to grace these shores.
Even 60 years after Real Madrid’s 7-3 annihilation of Eintracht Frankfurt, those present among the official Hampden crowd of 127,621 speak of the occasion in revered tones.
For them, this was more than just a football match. An experience that was beyond witnessing the Spanish aristocrats lifting the trophy for the fifth successive time.
Years before Pelé gave birth to the phrase, this was the birth of the beautiful game; a hypnotic destruction played out on our own hallowed turf.
The subsequent decades have seen Madrid move on to 13 European titles. Tellingly, none are considered to be more significant than that evening in Mount Florida.
For the Scottish public, the staging of the match at Hampden felt like a gift from above. Madrid had beaten French side Reims twice, Fio rentina and AC Milan in the previous four finals. Five months before Cassius Clay would win his first professional fight against Tunney Hunsaker, football’s undefeated heavyweight was in town for a joust that was expected to go the distance.
Although outsiders, Eintracht’s prowess was formidable and familiar. They’d beaten Scot Symon’s Rangers 12-4 on aggregate in the semi-finals, scoring six goals in each leg. They could call upon talents like Erwin Stein, Dieter Lindner and Erich Meier.
The plain fact, though, was that the Germans were novices at this level. The domestic title they had won the previous year was their first major honour. This would be a match between a side which had won everything and one who had won virtually nothing. The old schemer versus the new kid on the block.
Madrid arrived having beaten Barcelona 6-2 on aggregate in their semi-final. Their dazzling all-white strips added to the notion that the West of Scotland was about to be graced by the company of footballing gods rather than mere mortals. Nothing that transpired was a convincing argument to the contrary.
Even their names carried a certain elegance. Jose Santamaria, an imperious centre-half, known as the Wall. Francisco Gento, the left winger, the Gale of the Cantabrian Sea. Luis del Sol, a central midfielder, the Postman. Alfredo di Stefano, the centreforward, the Blond Arrow. Ferenc Puskas, a supporting striker, the Galloping Major.
For many, the game could not come quickly enough.
‘I didn’t just go to the game,’ recalled former Scotland boss Andy Roxburgh, who was then a youth player at Queen’s Park.
‘I went to their training session at Hampden the night before. The groundsman arranged for me to get in because Puskas was my boyhood hero. I was standing on the pitch as they warmed up. Gento was puffing on a cigarette as he casually flicked the ball about. ‘When the fitness trainer blew his whistle, he threw his cigarette on the grass and sprinted the length of the pitch. After that, he jogged back to the halfway line, picked up his fag and started again. He won the sprint, of course. By a mile.’ Many paying just five shillings for a youth standing ticket, all around Hampden’s terraces on the night itself stood young men for whom the experience would prove life-affirming. Alex Ferguson was present as were the bulk of the first British side to conquer Europe seven years later, Celtic’s Lisbon Lions.
They would witness Eintracht opening the scoring in 18 minutes through Richard Kress, a plot twist which Madrid viewed as no more threatening than a finger skelf.
Within nine minutes, Di Stefano had turned home Canario’s cross to equalise with the Argentine claiming his second three minutes later when Egon Loy, the German keeper, spilled a routine shot.
In first-half injury time, Puskas crashed home the third off the underside of the bar. The Hungarian’s second after the break came via the softest of penalty awards from Scottish referee Jack Mowat and was greeted with jeers from some neutrals sensing the end of the contest.
But his third, a close-range header from Gento’s cross, and his fourth, a flashing shot on the turn, owed nothing to chance.
Stein reduced the deficit to 6-2 only for Di Stefano to immediately bulldoze his way through the heart of the German defence to re-establish Real’s five-goal cushion.
Coming with 15 minutes remaining, Stein’s second and Eintracht’s third came via an erroneous pass back by Jose Maria Vidal and proved to be the final entry in the notebooks of the assembled press corps.
‘Here was the game as it could and should be played,’ recalled the late Hugh McIlvanney. ‘It was a watershed for me, as it was for so many.
‘Eintracht were a terrific team in their own right, but they were torn apart that night.
‘Di Stefano was a giant of the game. I met him years later in Argentina and what struck me was his power. His arms were like a blacksmith’s. In that great Real Madrid team, he was blatantly the boss.’
If modern-day football is evidently faster and more physical,
there are aspects of Real’s display that night that will never be lost through the passing of time.
Watching the images on YouTube all these years later, Gento is still a blur on the left wing. Canario, the Brazilian, dominates the opposing flank with his skill and directness.
You can still see how the composure and vision of Del Sol in midfield dictates the tempo of the game. The interplays between Di Stefano and Puskas are utterly hypnotic as, obviously, is the blur of goals they deliver.
All over the field, the first touch of those in white, their backheels and their appreciation of space is on a different level to their opponents. If you didn’t know better, you could be mistaken for believing it’s an exhibition match although, in the purest sense, it was.
There was no stampede for the exit on the final whistle. Indeed, so appreciative of what they’d seen were the home crowd that there was concern that they might never leave.
An estimated 70million TV audience were equally as enthralled. Jimmy Greaves once recalled watching the game with his England team-mates in a hotel in Budapest.
‘We sat there gobsmacked,’ he said. ‘We’d never seen anything like it, ever. Real were from another planet.’
Alongside him, a young Bobby Charlton agreed: ‘It was football on a different level than I’d been taught. My first thought had been: “This match is a phoney, edited, film, because these players are doing things that aren’t possible, aren’t real, aren’t human”.’
It seemed entirely legitimate to ask in that moment if the trophy would ever leave Madrid’s possession.
The end of the run came abruptly, though, an aggregate defeat to Barcelona at the first stage of their defence the following November the moment their stranglehold was loosened.
Incredibly, they would hold the old trophy just once in the subsequent 37 years, a 1966 triumph against Partizan Belgrade in Brussels.
They’d add two more, in 1998 against Juventus and in 2000 against Valencia, before darkening the doors of a slimmed-down Hampden again in 2002.
That night, coincidentally against another German opponent in Bayer Leverkusen, the old place bore witness to perhaps the greatest goal ever scored in a European Cup final — Zinedine Zidane’s majestic volley.
It cemented Madrid’s love affair with Hampden. For all those schoolboys who had been enraptured by football’s white magic on a warm, wind-blown night four decades previously, the feeling had always been mutual.