Tottenham Hotspur were different story. The League Cup was cherished, although it was poor revenge for yet another season the Spurs failed to play major role in the championship, finishing 8th. But all was relative in England: Manchester City, Chelsea, Manchester United, Everton were further down the table; Derby County, the champions of 1972, finished 7th; and Leeds United were 3rd, their great squad unable to win yet another year. The Spurs were neither surprise, nor disappointment – they usually occupied upper-mid-table place in those years. Good enough for a Cup – but where exactly the League Cup was placed in the English mind? Had to be third tournament in importance… Well, depends who one asks – may be third, may be second. Definitely second, if you ask winners.
Compared to Sunderland, certainly second: the Spurs were impressive team.
With Jennings, England, Chivers, Gilzean, Peters, and Perryman, the ‘North London Pride’ looks like title contender. Unlike Sunderland the Spurs did not stink in Europe – they won the UEFA Cup in 1972. Good and fine, but the team was aging. And the tendency of Pat Jennings to use only one hand for catching the ball was becoming more dangerous than fun.

England compensated for everybody – once again competitive league and new champion. The last time a club won two consecutive titles was in 1959 – Wolverhampton Wanderers – this alone was telling. And where were yesterday’s mighty winners in 1973? Hmm… Derby County, 1972 champions, finished 7th. Manchester City, 1968 champions, were 11th; Everton, 1970 champions, were 17th, just a place above the 1967 champions Manchester United. Manchester United that low? I could not believe my favourites, still with impressive squad, sinking, but – hey, worse was coming soon!
And this was not everything, of course: Norwich City, who finished 20th and were bound to enjoy Second Division the next season, reached the League Cup final – they lost to Tottenham Hotspur, but only 0-1. Sunderland, 6th in the Second Division, went even higher: they won the F.A. Cup beating Leeds United in front of 100 000 spectators 1-0. Some losers and some favourites!

Heroes indeed. The first Second Division team to win the Cup. In terms of Sunderland fanship – wonderful team. Two players managed to elevate themselves from anonymity: Denis Tueart (just as often spelled Tuart), who became a minor star in England, shuttling between England and USA by the end of the 1970s, and Dave Watson, who reached the national team with his uncompromising hard style. Not bad for Watson, considering the competition – particularly Colin Todd. Neither Tueart, nor Watson stayed with Sunderland for long. If Tueart joined the flock of European players grazing on the green US pastures, Watson went in different direction – one of the few English players who went to West Germany by the end of the decade. Werder (Bremen) in his case. The rest…is just the rest. In a way, teams like Sunderland were responsible for the sad disappearance of the Cup Winners Cup – the least exciting European club competition even in the early 70s, where small clubs and second division clubs often appeared. The holders of the English Cup made no waves in the tournament and quickly were eliminated. Outside English context – some heroes.

Which leaves us with jolly England – where total football impressed just like in Italy: nobody even thought of incorporating it. British football and championship is best, so why changing anything? Kind of… British has to be reduced to English. Scotland was still running 18-team First Division, dominated not even by two clubs, but one – Celtic were sole champions since 1966, and apart from the oldest derby in the world, Scottish football provided little fun. As for the other three championships in the British Isles, the less said the better – Wales did not even have a championship.

Back row, left to right: Jimmy Quinn, Bobby Murdoch, Tom Callaghan, Jim Craig, Evan Williams, Billy McNeill, Dennis Connaghan, George Conelly, Davie Hay, Vic Davidson, Pat McCluskey.
Front row: Paul Wilson, Jimmy Johnstone, Danny McGrain, Ken Dalglish, John Deans, Lou Macari, Bobby Lennox, Jim Brogan, Harry Hood.Good for another Scottish title and nothing else. Lou Macari was the player of the future, not Ken Dalglish - well, the future proved 1973’s expectations wrong. Macari was soon to experience Second Division football with Manchester United. As for the kilt… Luigi Macari was the son of Italian immigrants.

The Cup went again to AC Milan – complete repetition of 1972: same champion, same cup winner. As for fun… only one team managed to score more than two goals per game average – AC Milan with 65. The second highest scoring team was Juventus – measly 45. Six clubs scored less than 20 goals during the season. Only six clubs ended with less than ten draws. Even with Zoff Juventus did not have the best defense – Lazio received less goals. Daggers and garrote…
AS Roma barely escaped relegation, finishing at 11th place, but four clubs ended with the same points and goal difference decided final place. AS Roma happened to have better negative goal difference than the unlucky Atalanta, with Sampdoria and L.R. Vicenza sandwiched between them – the Romans boasted handsome minus 5; Atalanta – minus 17 goals. Some success…

The photo is actually from 1971-72 season, which was hardly different or better…
Bottom, left to right: Cappellini, Del Sol, Salvori, Vieri, Amarildo.
Top: Bet, Ginulfi, Cordova, Scaratti, Petrelli, Santarini.
The old Spanish star Luis Del Sol (European Champions Cup holder with Real Madrid in 1960) retired, but the rest played… another ancient star, Amarildo (World Champion with Brazil in 1962) was to add even one more season (he and Del Sol already were playing in Italy when the ban on foreign players was decreed and were allowed to continue playing – by 1972-73, pretty much the last handful of foreigners in Italy, all near retirement). Left from Amarildo is Roberto ‘Bob’ Vieri – worth mentioning: certainly a familiar name? Yes, but it is his son Christian Vieri. As for Bob… not much to say about him, except that he eventually went to Australia, grew beard, played there, and fathered Christian. Judging by the squad, no wonder AS Roma struggled to remain in First Division. Even the hardest Roma fans did not dream of anything more than mid-table performance.

From Iberia to the Apennines, then. Dominated by defensive schemes, Italian football was rich on 0-0 draws. Similar to the Soviet football in this, but at least the meager results were fought for. Total football was admired and not followed at all – it is strange: Italy always gives the impression of creativity, flair, artful inventions, free wheeling, whimsicality, lack of discipline, and beauty. Yet, nothing of that was present in Italian football – even before dreadful catenaccio was invented defensive tactics were quite dominant. It is also strange to realize that Italians were never much of soldiers, in terms of disciplined tough armies, that is, but were more inclined towards the art of sneaky dagger and the garrote. Well, Italian teams knew the art of the dagger and the garrote too, but they were also disciplined as if they were German soldiers. Total football liberated creativity, yet the Italians chose not to try it – perhaps, they practiced half of it already, everybody defending, and as long as success smiled on them, why engaging in some risky attacking affairs? More realistically, tradition is difficult to break with and Italian coaches were old school. Aging too, so changes were not invited.

Juventus were champions, edging the opposition, building their more interesting to watch and younger team when Inter and Milan were reluctant to imagine life without Rivera and Mazzola. Essentially, Juventus was the same squad of the year before and the only interesting nuance was their coach – Cestmir Vycpalek. He was kind of temporary coach, yet worth mentioning: who, on earth, was this guy? Well, a Czech football player, a right winger, who moved in 1946 from Slavia (Prague) to Italy, where played for Juventus, Palermo, and Parma until 1958. Then he returned to Czechoslovakia, but the Soviet invasion in 1968 was not to his taste and he emigrated back to Italy, this time for good. For years his coaching career was mediocre, so at the end old connections with Juventus’ brass placed him in the club as coach of the youth team. Then again good connections seemed helpful: he was appointed to coach the first team – Italian league titles followed in 1972 and 1973, and more or less that was that. Whatever Vycpalek was as a coach, his team was somewhat different on the field than the usual Italian way of playing. May be his central-European sensibility revolted against dreadful catenaccio, who knows? His presence helped Juventus not only to the titles, but elevated the ‘old lady’ to dominance in Italy and European conquests eventually followed. The glory days were still far in the future, and Vycpalek was not part of them, but he started them somehow.

Or may be not… the new boy of the team, acquired from Napoli in 1972, was Dino Zoff (no need to introduce him) – 30 years old. He played 30 matches during the season – that is, every game, for Italy still had 16-team league – allowing only 22 goals in his net. It was this season which established Zoff as Italian number one, leaving his rival Albertosi on the reserves bench. Who was really better between the two? Hard to tell – Albertosi was preferred in the 1960s, becoming European champion in 1968. Zoff was the goalkeeper in the 70s and in 1982 he captained World champions.

So much for attacking football: the new star is 30-years old goalkeeper.

Not exactly familiar squad? Quite right – apart from Dinis, Damas, and Hilario nobody else really played for the national team, and even these three did not become major stars. Dinis was the best promise at the time, yet he faded quickly. On top of it, the photo itself is wrong, as if to confirm the relative obscurity of the club – by mistake of the printers, it appears blue and white. Perhaps true green and white Spoting fans were enraged by that. Sorry, Portugal had to wait for many more years until becoming football power again, and colours became familiar enough to avoid embarrassing mistakes. But Sporting faded further soon – with the emergence of powerful FC Porto, which somewhat switched domestic rivalry in different direction. More or less, this was the last year Sporting (Lisbon) were the number two club in Portugal.

And brief departure to the other Iberian country, Portugal. Never among the big top championships, but with a good reputation because of the European success ob Benfica and Sporting in the first half of the 1960s. Golden period, more or less ending with the World Cup 1966, where Eusebio and Co thrilled the spectators. However, even Benfica in their best days was looked at with skepticism in Europe and the club never established the magical image preserved for Real, Inter, and Milan in public memory, save for Eusebio. The Portuguese league inspired even less enthusiasm and actually rightly: it was typical two-club dominated league at best – Benfica and Sporting provided for rivalry, splitting fans in Lisboa in the classic groups of ‘people’ vs ‘the state’, but on the pitch it was mostly Benfica anyway. A long hegemony, but by the end of the 1960s the squad was aging, including Eusebio, and nobody was emerging to replace him. Surely Benfica were still difficult to eliminate in Europe, but eliminated they were at least after the 1/8 finals. As for Sporting – hardly anybody paid attention to them. Which is the very reason for mentioning Portugal now: Benfica were still good enough to collect one more title, but Sporting grabbed the cup – pretty much the most they were able to do against Benfica.
One more title and this was not all: Benfica finished 18 points ahead of the second placed team. They did not lose a single game – 28 wins and 2 ties. Perfect home record – 15 wins from 15 games. They scored 101 goals and received only 13. The numbers were impressive – actually, a record unmatched in Europe. Fantastic team? Numbers and names suggests so: Eusebio, Simoes, Nene, Jorge (later highly respected coach), Humberto, Henrique, and the new promise Diamantino. A good mix of old stars, players in their prime, and young talent. Yet… Portuguese football was in decline. Benfica reigned supreme at home, where the opposition was weak. They were not that strong in the European tournaments. And the big names were not so big when playing for the national team.