Today I'm going back 38 years to 1984 and Tottenham's UEFA Cup Quarter Final 1st Leg tie against Austria Vienna played at White Hart Lane in front of 34,069. The sharp eyed amongst you will notice that Austria Vienna are referred to as FK Austria Memphis on the cover of the programme. This is because the club changed their name at the time to incorporate a sponsor name: that of the Memphis cigarette company. In fact it became worse than that as the full name of the club eventually became FK Austria Memphis Magna in recognition of the Chairman's Magna auto components company. Thankfully, sponsor naming was dropped in 2004 as the club reverted to FK (Fussballklub) Austria Wien (Vienna). I believe that there are rules in place preventing sponsor naming of English clubs and I hope that this never changes as it would, in my opinion, ruin club identities. The only way I would regard sponsor naming as being acceptable is in the case where a club climbs the football pyramid from the very bottom with their sponsor name already in place. Red Bull York City? No thank you!
The programme cover stars today are the respective captains of the two teams, Tottenham's Steve Perryman and Austria Vienna's Robert Sara. Steve Perryman is a Tottenham legend who made 866 appearances (scoring 39 goals) during a 17 year career with the club from 1969-1986. He went on to extend his career by a further four years, first with Oxford United and then with Brentford before moving into management both in England (Brentford and Watford) and then, unusually, Japan where Perryman coached J-League sides Shimzu S-Pulse and Kashiwa Reysol. This was followed by a long stint as Director of football at Exeter City between 2003-18 since when Perryman has retired. Like Perryman, Austrian Robert Sara played for 20 years for one club making 571 League appearances for Austria Wien and scoring 23 goals between 1965-1984. Sara also earned 55 caps for the Austrian national side scoring 3 goals. I doubt that you could find two such long serving captains facing off against each other these days!
The first goal of the game didn't come until the second half when a lovely floated free kick by Steve Perryman was nodded down by Graham Roberts into the path of Micky Hazard who controlled the ball beautifully before shooting, only to see his shot saved. The save rebounded to Steve Archibald who couldn't miss the open goal and didn't. Archibald had another sitter of a chance a few minutes later following a Gary Stevens long range effort which was parried into the path of Archibald once again. This time he hit the bar rather than netting the opportunity. Tottenham's second goal of the evening came from number nine Alan Brazil. It was his first goal for Spurs since December and was poked home to his obvious delight. Try as they might, a third goal, which would have surely made the second leg a formality, would not come with Glenn Hoddle in particular having a couple of point blank range efforts saved by the Austrian keeper Koncilia,. It finished 2-0 to Tottenham and when Alan Brazil scored the first goal in that second leg it surely was all done and dusted. Austria Vienna did make a game of it but it finished 2-2 to take Tottenham through to a Semi-Final tie against Hajduk Split 4-2 on aggregate.
CRB Match No. 295
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