It was one of the greatest nights in the Baseball Ground’s long history – Wednesday, October 25th, 1972, the date on which mighty Benfica were put to the sword.
Perhaps the greatest measure of the football miracle that Brian Clough and Peter Taylor had brought about at Derby County is that, only five years after the Rams had been rubbing along in the middle of the Second Division, they were competing in the European Cup.
When Clough and Taylor took over in June 1967, Carlisle, Plymouth and Rotherham were names on the fixture list.
Now Derby were going into the European Cup hat alongside Real Madrid, Ajax, Juventus – and Benfica.
European football came to the Baseball Ground for the first time – if you don’t count the 1962 Anglo-French Friendship Cup matches against Béziers, a club better known for rugby union – on September 13th, 1972, when 27,350 fans saw the Rams start with a 2-0 win over the Yugoslavian champions, Zeljeznicar of Sarajevo.
Almost 60,000 saw the Rams win 2-1 in Sarajevo to set up a second-round tie against one of the most famous names in world soccer.
Benfica, the Eagles of Lisbon, were managed by Jimmy Hagan, a great star of the post-war era when he played for Sheffield United and was capped for England.
But he could have been playing for the Rams, who had unwisely sold him to the Blades for a measly £2,500 back in 1938.
Hagan would have known what to expect as the Benfica team bus pulled into Shaftesbury Crescent on that misty October evening 45 years ago.
Quite what the Benfica stars made of the tight streets of little terraced houses is another matter.
Quite they made of the pitch is another matter. FIFA president Sir Stanley Rous wondered aloud how the playing surface could be so soft.
“Has it been raining here for a week?” he asked. In fact, Clough had made use of two firemen’s hoses.
In the book Walking on Water, Clough said that this was a regular occurrence before home games – a soft pitch was worth a point, he claimed – but whereas he normally left the water running for 20 minutes, on the eve of the Benfica game he fell asleep, waking up “drenched and with enough water on the ground to have staged an Olympic diving event”.
The Benfica players would also have been shocked by the nearness of a 38,100 crowd, and the noise that created.
Before kick-off Peter Taylor, in his usual disarming way, had run through a number of Benfica’s players, making inconsequential comments about them, before screwing up his piece of paper, tossing it to one side, and declaring: There’s nothing to worry about with this lot.”
And so it proved. After 30 minutes the Rams were 3-0 ahead through Roy McFarland, Kevin Hector and John McGovern.
It was one of the greatest nights the Baseball Ground had ever seen as Benfica were torn to shreds.
Even a 20-seconds floodlighting failure in the Estadio da Luz – the Stadium of Light – in Lisbon, could not save Benfica.
The great Eusebio was bearing down on Colin Boulton at the time, but he was as surprised as the goalkeeper.
When power was restored a few seconds later, Boulton was relieved to see that the ball had gone out for a goal-kick. Undaunted by Benfica’s reputation as brilliant attackers, the Rams drew 0-0 to go through 3-0 on aggregate.
And so the dream went on. Derby met Spartak Trnava of Czechoslovakia in the quarter-finals in March. Horvath put Spartak 1-0 ahead in the first leg, leaving the Rams to win at least 2-0 at the Baseball Ground.
They did it with goals from Hector, but there was a nail-biting final quarter of an hour. The 36,472 crowd knew that one slip could have sent the Rams out on the away-goals rule.
Derby County in the European Cup semi-finals – it was something that no Rams supporter of five years earlier would have dared to dream about as he travelled mournfully to Brunton Park and Millmoor.
The semi-final tie against Juventus has gone down in Rams history for all the wrong reasons. Losing 3-1 in Turin, Derby could only draw 0-0 at the Baseball Ground. There were mutterings of dark forces at work, but nothing was ever proven.
We were left with glorious memories – and none more glorious than the night Benfica were vanquished.