Champions League 2001: Leeds United vs Valencia

History was never far from Leeds United's progress in the Champions League. The first game had been against Barcelona, their semi-final opponents in 1975. Their opponents in the final that year had been Bayern Munich, who were taking on Real Madrid in 2001's other semi-final tie. Real Madrid, of course, were the team Don Revie had longed his Leeds would emulate, and Leeds had played them twice already in the 2001 Group Stages. They'd also beaten and drawn with Milan, rotten victors over Leeds in the 1973 Cup Winners' Cup final.

United's semi-final opponents now were Valencia, and while in West Yorkshire that meant a tough match against the previous season's losing finalists, it didn't immediately jog memories of four games between the clubs in the Fairs Cup tournaments of the 1960s. Leeds had won 2-1 on aggregate in 1966, 3-1 in 1967. They were the first foreign visitors to defeat Valencia at their Mestalla stadium, something that had only happened five times since. It wasn't well remembered in Leeds, but people in Valencia remembered very well. 

"I said before the match that Valencia were a tough side and they proved it," Don Revie had said after the two sides first met, at Elland Road in February 1966. "If you have to play like they did to do well in Europe, I think we are better out of it," he went on. 

Ten minutes from the end of that 1-1 draw, Jack Charlton had clashed with the goalkeeper, Nito, sparking a brawl that spread across the pitch and involved twenty players and several police officers. The referee, Leo Horn, took both teams off the field to cool down, and sent off Charlton and Francisco Vidagany. Once the game restarted, another Valencia player, José Sánchez Lage, was ordered off for hacking down Jim Storrie.

At the time, Valencia's manager Sabino Barinaga said more Leeds players should have been sent off, but "Sometimes the trouble is so big the referee cannot do anything. This was one of those times." He blamed Leeds: "You see these sort of things every Saturday in the English League and I saw it with my own eyes tonight."

And, 35 years on, people in Spain still blamed Leeds, and English football. The newspaper Marca splashed a one-word headline — 'Thuggery' — over their reports that Valencia were expecting a new millennium update of the same old Dirty Leeds in the first leg at Elland Road. Marca had photos from a training session in which Valencia's present manager, Héctor Cúper, had his players practicing how to deal with elbows, shirt-pulls and rough challenges. "It was an exercise in shielding the ball," claimed Cúper, but his players were not so coy about their preparation.