Then, inexplicably. Big Jock dropped Geordie for the final and put him on the substitutes' bench. He went with the two in midfield - Murdy and Bertie - that had worked so wonderfully well in Lisbon in 1967. This was a different game, though. Feyenoord were exceptionally strong across the middle of the park where their main man was Wim van Hanagem, who was dismissed by Jock as being a 'poor man's Jim Baxter'. It was unlike our boss to misread a situation, but on this occasion he got it wrong; very wrong. Our line-up played right into their hands. We had Jinky, Willie Wallace, John Hughes and Bobby Lennox as a four-man frontline, but with the Dutch's stranglehold in the middle of the park, they were starved of any reasonable service. Normally, I could get forward when Jinky was buzzing, but the wee man was being suffocated by their defence. They double-banked and even treble-banked on him. They tried to force him inside into an already cluttered midfield where they had players waiting to pick him off.
Feyenoord played a pressing game all over the park and we were struggling to get into any sort of rhythm. They worked our defence well and didn't give us a moment's respite. Ove Kind vail, their Swedish striker, was keeping Billy McNeill occupied while Jim Brogan had picked up an early foot injury that curtailed his movement a bit. Tommy Gemmell was getting forward, as usual, but our cavalier fullback also had his work cut out deep in his own territory.
