Old Trafford's best games: Barcelona (1984)
The first in our series of Old Trafford's greatest matches focuses on the heroics against Barcelona in 1984.
United 3 Barcelona 0
Date: 21 March 1984
Competition: European Cup Winners’ Cup, quarter-final second leg
Pre-match context: A two-goal defeat in the Nou Camp, during which presentable chances came and went for the Reds, left Barcelona in full control of the tie ahead of their mid-March trip to Old Trafford.
Before the return, however, United skipper Bryan Robson took the unusual step of publicly pledging to turn things around. A look at the visitors’ squad, including Diego Maradona and Bernd Schuster among others, rendered Robbo’s claim bold, to say the least.
Rivalry: While the Reds had plentiful shared history with Real Madrid, this tie was a first-ever competitive meeting with Catalonia’s finest.
Atmosphere: “You could more or less feel the ground shaking,” Robson later recalled, of an evening widely cited as the greatest atmosphere ever produced at Old Trafford. Perched up in the press box, legendary Times scribe Hugh McIlvanney poured his customarily brilliant prose all over the occasion, stressing: “It was a touch of the old-time religion, the tribal fervour that reminds us of how deeply football can still affect a huge mass of working-class people in this country. The atmosphere at Old Trafford was like a hot, feverish wind from another time.”
United’s performance: From the first whistle, the Reds harnessed the baying goodwill from the stands and harassed the visitors whenever they dared even glance at the ball. “We just kept hammering at them,” said midfielder Ray Wilkins. “Eventually, the door broke down.”
Midway through the first half, Robson dived to head in from a corner and halved the deficit, before a maddening two minutes shortly after half-time flipped the tie on its head. First, Robson pounced again after goalkeeper Javier Urruticoechea fumbled Wilkins’s shot, then Frank Stapleton rammed in from close-range after a knock-down from Norman Whiteside.
United were so het up, Wilkins later revealed, that the biggest issue was coming down afterwards. “I never slept a wink,” he laughed. “For days, I was on an adrenaline rush.”
Plot twists: United made mincemeat of the visitors for the first hour, before becoming acutely aware of the tie’s fine balance. For those in the stands, watching a half-hour defensive action felt like a lifetime.
Significance: In the short term, the jaw-dropping win led only to a last-gasp semi-final exit in Turin at the hands of Juventus. In the long run, however, there was now a reference point not only for great European nights at Old Trafford, but for the power of the Red Army.