For May 12th I'm going back 28 years to 1993 and the European Cup Winners Cup Final at Wembley.
The chance to attend a European Final doesn't come along very often. In fact, in all my days I've only managed two such Club Finals and this game was one of them (you'll have to wait until next week to read about the other). What makes it even better is the fact that this UEFA competition no longer exists. It began in 1960 and originally ranked ahead of the UEFA Cup as second most prestigious to the European Cup even though the UEFA Cup was probably the harder competition to win. The Cup Winners Cup's currency became devalued by the expansion of the European Cup (or Champions League as it became known) which took in more top clubs from each European league and it was played for for the last time in 1999 after which it was merged with the UEFA Cup.
The European Cup Winners' Cup (or UEFA Cup Winners Cup from 1994) was, exactly what it said on the tin, a competition for European clubs who had won their domestic Cup competition during the previous season. However, it wasn't quite as simple as that. For instance, if a club side had managed to win both the Cup and the League (known as doing "the double"), they would enter the European Cup in preference to the Cup Winners' Cup. In such cases, the losing finalist in the domestic Cup competition would take the Winners' place instead. Unless they came from outside the top division in which case.... it was complicated you see?
The 1993 Final was the second and last occasion on which it would be played at Wembley (the first was West Ham United's victory against 1860 Munich in 1965) and involved Italy's Parma and Belgium's Royal Antwerp and was played before just 37,393 people which explains how I was able to get a ticket. You have to be a real European football aficionado to recognise the names of the players involved that night but the chance to get to see a top Italian club side in a competitive game at a time when Italy's Serie A was arguably the best league in the world was a chance not to be missed in my opinion.
Do foreign clubs have nicknames like the British ones do? Why yes! Parma are often referred to as the Gialloblu (literally the yellow/blue) whereas Royal Antwerp are also known as "The Great Old" (it feels like there's a swear word missing at the end there but apparently they're just The Great Old).
It was Parma's first European trophy in their first European Final and they would also go on to win two UEFA Cups in their 1990's golden age. Leeds fans may be interested to know that Tomas Brolin was in the Parma side but he was neither fat nor the carthorse that he became in Yorkshire and we were spared his childlike goal celebration as he failed to score that night. The scoring honours were left instead to Lorenzo Minotti, Alessandro Melli and Stefano Cuoghi and indeed Melli should have had a second which was ruled out for offside when replays showed that it wasn't. Irrespective, Parma won the game 3-1.
I wonder whatever happened to the proposal for all the previous winners of the European Cup Winners Cup to play in a new competition which would have been called the European Cup Winners Cup Winners Cup?
CRB Match No. 839
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