50 YEARS OF EUROPEAN FOOTBALL

Frank Keating in today's Guardian.

Football's European odyssey of incident and grandeur resumes tonight. But how many are aware that it was Manchester City who made it possible for Manchester United to be England's trailblazers?

Thirty years ago this month I had afternoon tea - including toasted teacakes - with Sir Matt Busby at Old Trafford after he had agreed to an interview on the 20th anniversary of his team's historic first expedition into Europe. As his successor, another knighted Scot, prepares the club for its latest assault on Europe tonight, that 1977 birthday has turned into a rounded half-century but how vividly still I recall the elderly football eminence in his reverie that day. How the tender gleams of both profound and gloomy sadness and warm, fond recollection alternated in his soft-boiled eyes as he told the tale.

The European Cup had begun in 1955: Hibs had entered from Scotland but that year's English champions, Chelsea, had feebly heeded the insular Football League's ban. There was no such timidity from Busby when his bonny Babes were 1956 champs - in ambition anyway - but Old Trafford couldn't yet even afford the prerequisite for entry, namely a set of floodlights. Thus Busby's chairman, well named, the tight-fisted Harold Hardman, knew defiance of the League was impossible - until Sir Matt suggested that for European matches they hire City's Maine Road ground - lit up since 1953 - and the resulting gate-money share "would easily pay for our own set of lights by Easter". Hardman was swayed; the League incensed.

So on September 26 1956, 75,000 filled their rivals' Moss Side arena to see United overwhelm Anderlecht 10-0 (12-0 on aggregate) with a show described by Busby those 20 years on as "the most exquisite 90-minute exhibition ever displayed by any side of mine". Later that autumn Borussia Dortmund were beaten 3-2 over two legs.

After Europe's new year break United lost 5-3 in a Cantabrian blizzard at Athletic Bilbao on February 6. The "lifeline" final goal - "honestly, still the most magnificently daring individual goal I've ever witnessed" - was scored by the only "foreigner" in the side, the Dubliner Billy Whelan; and at the airport next morning, in harrowing augury of February 6 a year later at Munich, "all of us, including you pressmen, had to wield brooms and our bare hands to scrape the ice and snow off the wings of the Pionair Dakota before we could take off". He had remembered the name of the aeroplane "because I knew we'd suffer deadly serious recriminations from a gloating League if we hadn't been at Hillsborough to play Wednesday the very next day".

A fortnight later at Maine Road they beat the Basques 3-0 for a 6-5 aggregate victory and, although they were to lose in the semi-final 5-3 overall to the fabled holders Real Madrid, before the fulminating 2-2 second leg Old Trafford had, as Busby promised, switched on its own gleaming new floodlights. Fifty years on I fancy old hands - and no end of Red Devil ghosts - will be mindfully moist-eyed tonight.