Tougher Than Bullets: the Heroic Tale of a Black Watch Survivor of the Korean War by Harold Davis

Author:Harold Davis [Harold Davis with Paul Smith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mainstream Publishing
Published: 2012-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

16

A EUROPEAN MISSION

THERE’S ALWAYS ONE THAT GETS away. For me, that one was a European winner’s medal. We came close, just a whisker – one game – away from getting that prize on the shelf.

Ibrox always had a great atmosphere, but that was especially true on the big European nights. It was inspiring for the home players, intimidating for the visitors. With that behind us, we had a wonderful platform to go on and do well in the Continental competitions, and we certainly did that, with some more than decent performances.

In the 1960–61 season, we went all the way to the final of the European Cup-Winners’ Cup, proving that Scottish teams could live with the best in the world when it came to club football. I was fortunate to play against just about every nation you could think of during that period: the French, the Spanish, English teams and everything in between. Our final paired us with the Italians of Fiorentina – a real test if ever there was one. They had been runners-up in Serie A the previous season, second only to the impressive Juventus team of that era, and that told us something about what we could expect when we faced them.

It was the only time the European Cup-Winners’ Cup final was played over two legs, and I don’t think it was necessarily to our advantage. When you play a one-off cup final, it is cut and dried: you are going out there to win, no grey area. Over two legs, there’s a different mentality and so many issues to cloud it. Do you attack at home with your crowd behind you? Do you keep it tight in the first leg and go all out in the second? What’s a comfortable lead to take into the second tie? One goal? Two goals? All of those questions and more have to be taken into consideration, and it almost becomes more of a game of chess than a football match.

As it happened, we were at home in the first leg, and Fiorentina would have to sample that Ibrox atmosphere. The Italians were past masters at playing cutely; we knew they would come to Ibrox looking to shut us out and take us back to Florence to try to finish the job.

They ended up leaving Glasgow with more than they could have hoped for: a 2–0 win. I was held accountable for the opening goal, with a back pass to Billy Ritchie being intercepted by one of the Italian forwards. It will go down in history as my mistake, but I still reckon if Billy had come off his line he would have got to it first. Not that I’d criticise Billy too much; he was a great servant to the club.

They’d opened the scoring just twelve minutes into the match, and they grabbed another one in the final minute to give the type of cushion they could only have dreamt of before they touched down in Scotland.

Our cause wasn’t helped

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